The Apple Watch accounted for two-thirds of smartwatch shipments in 2015

It is hardly surprising that Apple cashed-in big last holiday season, but it is interesting to note that according to Canalys, the company's smartwatch did particularly well, shipping 12 million units. Canalys estimates that this constitutes around two-thirds of all shipments – impressive volume indeed.

In this chart, Cupertino is followed closely by Samsung with the Gear S2, which returned to the runner-up spot after releasing its improved designs. Pebble occupies the third spot and Huawei is forth. The latter is quite an impressive achievement form the Chinese OEM, which managed to top the likes of LG, despite having only one smartwatch to date.

But statistics get even more interesting in the realm of bands, which would also include wearables without an OS and third-party app support. Here the Fitbit reigns supreme, followed closely by Xiaomi's Mi Bands, which sold just as well as the Apple watch at 13 million units during 2015. What this means is that the Fitbit actually outsold the Apple Watch in pure volume, possibly hinting that users still tend to go for more fitness-oriented wearables and let's not forget – cheaper ones.

Analyst Daniel Matte commented on the matter saying:

Software increasingly belongs on the wrist, and this is the direction the market is going … As the next step along this path, the Fitbit Blaze is the right product for the company to develop. It is competitively priced and is still being squarely focused on fitness.

Canalyst's numbers also estimate that Fitbit, Apple and Garmin together contributed to an astounding growth of over 60% sequentially to the entire wearable device market.