The biggest story in the smartphone market is big phones.
According to new stats released this morning by Kantar Worldpanel, phones with screens bigger than 5.5 inches — which the firm calls "phablets," as in phone-tablet — made up 21% of all US smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2015.
That's up from only 6% a year ago.
What's driving this? Clearly it's the iPhone 6 Plus, which came out in September. Kantar said that Apple's giant phone made up 44% of all US phablet sales, making it number one by far.
Kantar would not share the breakdown by model, but told Business Insider that Samsung was the number two US phablet vendor with 27% of sales, thanks probably to the Galaxy Note 4, and LG was number three with 22%, which is probably mostly the G3.
Kantar also said that only 11.4% of new iOS customers in the US switched from Android, down from 14.6% last year. That's counter to the worldwide trend, at least according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who said on Apple's last quarterly earnings call, "We continue to see a higher rate of switchers than we have seen in previous cycles."
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