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Kindle Fire grabs half of Android share in February

The popularity of Amazon's tablet shows no sign of abating, as a new ComScore report indicates.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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Amazon's Kindle Fire doubled its share of the Android tablet market, according to ComScore.
Amazon's Kindle Fire doubled its share of the Android tablet market, according to ComScore. Comscore

Online retailer giant Amazon is quickly becoming a device heavyweight.

Amazon's Kindle Fire grabbed a 54.5 percent share in February, almost doubling its share in the past two months and "already establishing itself as the leading Android tablet by a wide margin," according to ComScore (see chart below).

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ComScore said its methodology "measures unique devices accessing the Web during the time period noted, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups."

Samsung's Galaxy Tab was a distant runner-up with a 15.4 percent share in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom with 7.0 percent share. The Asus Transformer and Toshiba AT100 were also in the top five with 6.3 percent and 5.7 percent market share, respectively.

Amazon's tablet sports a 7-inch screen and is priced at only $199 -- undoubtedly one reason for its popularity.

Though analyst reports have varied, IDC says Amazon shipped just shy of 5 million units in the fourth quarter of last year. More recent figures are not available yet. Amazon does not publish shipment numbers.

The iPad is still the undisputed tablet leader overall. Apple said this week that it sold 11.8 million iPads in the second quarter.

ComScore
*ComScore Device Essentials measures unique devices accessing the web during the time period noted, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups.

"For the purposes of this study, Nook was classified as an e-reader and not a tablet," a ComScore spokeswoman said, referring to Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet.