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New Records Were Set on Christmas Day for Android, iThing Activations

The app analytics service Flurry reminded us today how someone is always watching. According to their latest blog post, Tuesday marked the new record for the largest number of mobile devices being turned on for the first time, and it also set a new record for the number of apps downloaded.

Over 17 million new iThings and Android devices were activated on Tuesday, up from an average of around 4 million a day for the part of December. Flurry also tracked 328 million new apps being downloaded, which was just over twice the daily average for the first 20 days in December.

And of course Apple came out ahead. The single most common device was the iPad, followed by the Kindle Fire HD. Just over half the new activations were for tablets, a marked difference from the rest of December.

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It seems that smartphones are the gadget people tend to buy for themselves, while tablets are more likely to be gifts. That would fit in well with today’s news from the Pew Research Center which showed that tablet ownership rose much faster during the last holiday season than it did in the year that followed.

The above chart suggests that next month we’ll be reading about another significant jump in tablet ownership.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem like the Microsoft Surface is seeing the same love as the iPad and Android tablets. As you can see from the following chart, a survey of first tweets from various gadgets resulted in a rather low number for the Surface.

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That survey is not at all scientific, but it stands as a good rule of thumb. One of the first things I did after setting up my new U410 was to tweet about it. I’m sure lots of other gadget owners did the same.

And the anecdotal evidence provided by the tweets is backed up by a new report from Chitaka. That showed that the Kindle Fire was generating about 5% of the ad impressions of the iPad, with Samsung and Google tablets coming in a distant 2nd and 3rd place. The Surface generated about a fifth of 1% of the ad impressions generated by the iPad.

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Comments


Common Sense December 28, 2012 um 12:46 pm

I’m glad you backed that up with the ad impressions because no one I know uses Twitter but they all have either iPads or Kindle Fires.


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