Android Samsung Electronics were the big winners in the tablet market last year, as sales grew by 68 percent, according to market research company Gartner.

rldwide sales of tablets to end users totalled 195.4 million units, fuelled by sales of low-end, smaller screen devices, purchases by first time buyers, the company said Monday.

Android has become the biggest tablet operating system with 62 per cent of the market. In 2012, ’s OS trailed Apple’s iOS by a margin of about 8 million tablets, but by the end of last year had turned that into a 50 million-unit lead.

The Android camp led by Samsung sold almost 121 million tablets, for a 61.9 percent share, compared to 53.3 million units a 45.8 percent share in 2012. Apple’s tablet sales increased from 61.5 to 70.4 million units, but because the overall market grew faster, the company’s share dropped from 52.8 percent to 36 percent.

Microsoft’s ndows tablet sales improved but the share remained small at 2.1 percent, with shipments growing from 1.2 million to 4 million units. To compete, Microsoft needs to create a more compelling ecosystem for consumers as well as developers across all mobile devices, Gartner said.

Apple’s strong fourth quarter helped it maintain the top position among the manufacturers. Samsung, ranked in second place, had the biggest growth of the worldwide tablet vendors, at 336 per cent. The expansion improvement of its Galaxy tablet portfolio, together with a lot of marketing, helped Samsung shrink the gap with Apple.

Samsung sold 37.4 million tablets for a 19.1 percent slice of the market.

The rest of the top 5 was made up of Asus, Amazon.com novo. Of those three companies, novo did particularly well with tablet sales growing by 198 per cent to 6.5 million units, or a 3.3 percent market share. The company’s success was due to a combination of new tablet models launched during the second half of last year, sales of its Yoga model its ndows tablets doing particularly well, Gartner said.

However, novo is still behind Asus, with 11 million units sold, Amazon, with 9.4 million. Asus’ market share grew from 5.4 percent to 5.6 percent, while Amazon’s share declined from 6.6 percent to 4.8 percent.

As the tablet market becomes even more competitive, this year it will be critical for vendors to improve user experience, technology ecosystem value beyond just hardware cost, Gartner said.