Holidays bring market share gains for Apple's iPhone, iPad remains dominant

The study, conducted by web and advertising analytics firm Chitika, collated traffic statistics from "tens of millions" of U.S. and Canadian mobile devices across the company's network between Dec. 20 and Dec. 29. Data from the days immediately preceding Christmas was combined and compared to traffic from the days immediately following the holiday.

Apple's 1.8-percent gain in smartphone traffic represented the only increase among the handset vendors tracked in the study, with Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung all declining by between 0.1 and 0.8 percent. The iPhone was good for 54.3 percent of smartphone traffic, easily besting second-place Samsung's 23.7 percent.

It is unclear how much of the traffic was driven by Apple's newest flagship iPhone 5s and mid-range iPhone 5c as Chitika did not provide a more detailed breakdown, but the firm did say that the data indicates the "latest set of 5s and 5c devices remained a hit with consumers."

Roles were reversed in the tablet market as the iPad shed 1.3 percent of its traffic share, though it maintained a massive 76.1 percent of all tablet-originated traffic. Amazon's Kindle tablets were the biggest beneficiaries of the iPad's decline, clocking 9.4 percent of all logged tablet traffic, a 0.6-percent increase.

Microsoft, Samsung, and Google each picked up between 0.1 and 0.5 percent.

Though Apple holds more than three-quarters of all tablet traffic tracked by Chitika, the iPad's share is down nearly 10 percent compared to a July report from the firm which credited the iPad with 84.3 percent of tablet traffic.