Apple Wins Holiday Season as Phablets Become New Norm

In this day and age, mobile devices make for very popular Christmas gifts. To find out which types of devices were most in demand this past holiday season, Flurry Analytics has analyzed new device activations during the week leading up to Christmas.

According to their findings, Apple was the big winner this holiday season. iPhones and iPads accounted for 44 percent of all new device activations between December 19 and 25, with Samsung coming in second at 26 percent of newly activated devices.

Once again, large-screen smartphones, so-called phablets, proved particularly popular under the Christmas tree. They accounted for 53 percent of new device activations this holiday season, up from 37 percent last year and just 27 percent in 2015. Once derided as clunky niche devices, larger phones such as Samsung's Galaxy Note or Apple's iPhone 8 Plus have apparently become the new norm. Let's see if evolution will give us bigger hands to deal with the added screen sizes.