Digital research agency comscore today said Amazon’s Kindle Fire now accounts for more than half of all the Android tablets sold in the United States. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has seen its share tumble over the last three months, numbers revealed.
Within the Android tablet market, Kindle Fire has almost doubled its share in the past two months from 29.4 percent share in December 2011 to 54.4 percent share in February 2012, establishing itself as the leading Android tablet by a wide margin.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab family followed with a market share of 15.4 percent in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom with 7.0 percent share. The Asus Transformer and Toshiba AT100 rounded out the top five with 6.3 percent and 5.7 percent market share, respectively.
Samsung’s share has gone from nearly 24% in December to 15.4% now, while Mototola’s share slipped from 11.8% to 7% in the three months. Asus, with its transformer tablet range, was the only big player that was able to maintain its market share, roughly at 6.3%.
It must be noted that the declines are caused by the exploding sales of Kindle Fire rather than a sharp fall in the sales of other tablets.
Larger Screen Tablets See Higher Level of Content Consumption
Tablet adoption among U.S. consumers continues to climb as more devices appealing to various price and feature preferences are introduced to the market. Screen size is perhaps the most outwardly apparent differentiator between devices, with the market offering consumers a wide variety of options such as the 10″ Apple iPad, 9″ Sony S1, 7″ Amazon Kindle Fire and 5″ Dell Streak, comScore said.
Analysis of page view consumption by screen size found a strong positive association between screen size and content consumption. Specifically, 10″ tablets have a 39-percent higher consumption rate than 7″ tablets and a 58-percent higher rate than 5″ tablets, it added.
Although many factors – such as demographics, content availability, connection speed and ease of portability – may influence consumption levels, the results of this analysis highlight important questions for the industry as the tablet space develops, comScore said.
With the emergence of a growing number of smaller-sized tablet devices, advertisers and publishers will need to understand whether these devices limit the opportunity for advertising compared to their larger-screen counterparts, or if they are able to build incremental reach and engagement by presenting different use cases, the research firm added.
Smartphone Carrier Market Share Shows Variation Across Key States
Looking exclusively at the top four carriers, AT&T accounted for the largest share of unique smartphones in Texas (46.2 percent), California (42.9 percent) and Illinois (42.1 percent), while Verizon claimed the top spot in New York (43.6 percent) and Florida (36.5 percent). The greatest disparity in carrier share between AT&T and Verizon occurred in Texas, where AT&T’s smartphone share was more than double that of Verizon’s share.
Sprint PCS ranked as the third largest smartphone carrier in each of the top five markets, with the carrier owning its highest market share in Illinois at 22.8 percent. T-Mobile USA captured its highest market share in Texas, where the carrier accounted for 11.9 percent of smartphone devices.