Last winter, the Apple haters were delighted to learn that Amazon appeared to have a winner on their hands with the Kindle Fire tablet. That 7-inch gadget sold for a "mere" $200, and evidently did pretty well over the holiday season, with reported sales of several million units. Well, at least that's what the industry analysts said since, of course, Amazon never discloses unit sales of hardware in their quarterly financials. I suppose sales were to be inferred by sampling dealer sell-throughs, or by examining Amazon's earnings. But since many of those Kindles are sold directly, the results are little more than educated or not-so-educated guesses.

Indeed, if you can believe those reports, the Fire took control of more than half the otherwise stagnant Android tablet market. Sure, Amazon puts their own face on the Fire, so it's not obviously Android, but that still counts as support for the platform.

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There are published reports this week that claim that Samsung sold more smartphones than Apple in the last quarter, reclaiming a number one position. Good news for Samsung; that is, if the news can be believed. You see it's not based on any actual sales information from Samsung. According to one of those reports, "Since Samsung doesn’t report unit numbers, IDC and its competitors have to estimate how many devices the company sells."

But those estimates aren't even consistent. IDC estimated 42.2 million smartphone shipments for Samsung, compared to Apple's 35.1 million number. Yet another firm, Strategy Analytics, pegged Samsung's smartphone shipments at 44.5 million units, but IHS iSuppli said it was "only" 32 million. That figure, if true, would leave Apple in the lead, a position they earned in the previous quarter.

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In the days following Apple's announcement of the second best quarterly earnings in the company's history, the stock price predictably soared after taking a huge dive. This came in the wake of fears that wireless carriers may be revolting against the high subsidies they have to pay for an iPhone compared to the competition. Certainly the fact that smartphone activations were much lower at AT&T during the last quarter stoked some of those fears, except that 78% of those activations were iPhones. You'd think the other handset makers would be really frightened.

Certainly, the sales figures looked encouraging, since they mostly met or exceeded industry analyst expectations. Take the 35.1 million new iPhones sold in the March quarter. Yes, maybe sales slowed in the U.S., but they were going gangbusters elsewhere, particularly in developing nations such as China. Gone are the days when Apple would depend on the good old U.S.A. for the lion's share of sales of Macs and mobile gear.

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If you look at the sales figures, you are tempted to say that Google's Android OS is trouncing the iPhone. But there's a lot to be said about those figures and how they can be interpreted. Despite the ubiquity of Android handsets, there's that incredible amount of fragmentation -- I suppose Google would rather call it it diversity -- that can cause troubles for users of those products. The same problem afflicts Android powered tablets, but since sales are pathetic -- other than the Amazon Kindle Fire, which uses a tricked out version of Android -- it doesn't really matter.

Thanks to a link from one of our regular readers, I learned that Google has actually admitted to the problem, although they are predictably giving a positive spin on something that otherwise ought to be a huge negative. The link to an AOL Daily Finance report on the situation is posted over at our community forum, in case you want to check it out and comment further.

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