Global tablet sales in 2013 increased 68 per cent year-on-year, according to a Gartner report, hitting a total 195.4m units. This growth, Gartner says, was driven by the low-end, smaller-screen tablet market, which enabled Android to take the majority market share for the first time

Devices running Googles OS – including forked versions, as with Amazons Kindle Fire tablets – hit 121m units, an increase of 127 per cent on 2012. Thats equivalent to 61.9 per cent of all tablets sold globally in 2013, compared to 45.8 per cent the previous year.

While the number of iPads sold also grew, by 14.5 per cent, its total market share dropped to 36 per cent, down from 54.8 per cent in 2012.

Its worth noting, though, that these sales figures dont necessarily represent install based, and Apple was still the biggest single manufacturer of tablets last year. iPads commanded a larger market share than the top three Android manufacturers – Samsung (19.1 per cent), Asus (5.6 per cent), and Amazon (4.8 per cent) – combined.

The biggest percentage increase actually came from tablets running Windows. Sales jumped 256.8 per cent, but still only added up to just over 4m units.

The number of devices running a different OS also shrank, from 0.3 per cent to less than 0.1 per cent – a total of just 41,598 devices.