An employee demonstrates the new Kindle Fire HD 8.9'' at Amazon's Kindle Fire event in Santa Monica, California. Credit: Reuters/Gus Ruelas
The most recent smartphone figures from comScore, also released this week, show similar gains for the three months up to November 2012. Samsung smartphone handsets accounted for 26.9 percent of new smartphone activations in the US market in the month before the holiday season (up by 1.2 percentage points), while Apple's iPhones accounted for 18.5 percent (up 1.4 percentage points), giving the company's operating system, iOS, a 35 percent market share, compared with Android's 53.7 percent.
Unlike Chitika's data, which is based on web and mobile ad impressions, comScore's results are based on surveying 30,000 US mobile subscribers.
Chitika also monitored tablet activity over December and discovered that while the iPad still accounts for 78.86 percent of tablet-generated web traffic, it saw its market share fall by 7.14 percent. Conversely, Amazon increased its market share by 3.03 percent, its Kindle Fire tablets now accounting for 7.51 percent of the market. Even Microsoft's Surface RT saw a usage bump of 0.17 percent, which translates as a 0.4 percent share of the market.
As Apple prepares to publish its latest quarterly sales figures on January 23, a projection by Rob Cihra of Evercore Partners expects the firm to reveal global iPhone sales of 50 million (a 35% year-on-year increase) and iPad sales totaling 24 million (up 56% on the same period in 2011).