Apple Inc. iPhones And iPads Scored Big This Christmas, New Data Reveals

It turns out Santa may be an Apple fan as well. If you opened up a present at Christmas that was a smartphone or tablet, there’s a good chance that it was an Apple iPhone or iPad.

Of the devices activated in the week leading up to and including Christmas Day (Dec. 19-25), Apple accounted for about 51.3 percent of mobile devices, according to Yahoo-owned analytics company Flurry. That’s nearly three times Samsung, which held the No. 2 position with 17.7 percent, followed by Microsoft devices with 5.8 percent.

Following the top three positions, most manufacturers failed to hold more than 1 percent share of device activations other than Sony and LG, which held 1.6 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.

While Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone manufacturers have been boasting large volumes of shipments through 2014, Xiaomi, Huawei and HTC had less than 1 percent share during the period tracked. But this may be due to Dec. 25 not being the biggest gift-giving day of the year in Asian markets, according to Flurry.

And with device activations came the deluge of app installs. Compared to an average day in the first three weeks of December, the number of app installs was 2.5 times higher. Also popular this year was the push for different form factor smartphones, with phablets share growing to 13 percent and medium-sized phone share shrinking 1 percent to 64 percent share. Tablets also lost some share to phablets, with full-size and small tablet activations shrinking to 11 percent each.

Apple blew past Wall Street expectations earlier this year in its fourth fiscal quarter, posting earnings of $8.5 billion or $1.42 a share on $42.1 billion in revenue, driven by strong sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which launched in September. And analysts are expecting the company to sell anywhere between 67 and 70 million iPhones this quarter, a 37 percent increase from the 51 million iPhones sold in the same period last year, according to company filings.