Amazon Kindle Fire makes up half of all Android tablets sold in the U.S.

We all know that when it comes to tablets, it's the iPad that's been smashing sales records since the first generation came out in 2010. But if you only take Android tablets into account, then it's the Amazon Kindle Fire that's king. According to business analytics firm comScore, the Kindle Fire makes up 54.4% of all Android tablets in the United States as of February 2012.

There's a large number of other Android tablets competing with the Kindle Fire for a their own piece of the pie. The Samsung Galaxy Tab family only makes up 15.4% of the market in spite of all the available versions for sale. The first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, has a measly 7% share; the precursor of the Transformer Prime Ice Cream Sandwich tablet, the Asus Transformer, makes up 6.3%; and Sony's Tablet S has a measly 0.7% share.

The funny thing is that the best-selling Android tablet uses a heavily modified platform that bares little resemblance to the original Android operating system. And there was a time when you couldn't surf Google Play on the Kindle Fire even if you were using a browser. While you can now access Google's own app market from the Kindle Fire, the tablet's default is still the Amazon App Store.

The firm didn't analyze the reason behind those numbers, but it's easy to see why the Kindle Fire has been selling so well: Amazon's aggressive $199 pricing clearly continues to win over customers. And for those who want a tablet mainly for reading ebooks or for streaming Amazon Prime content, the Kindle Fire is the obvious choice. Of course, this may all change if and when Google releases an official tablet, but we'll just have to wait and see.

ComScore via Electronista

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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