While Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped in recent months, there seems to be little for Cupertino to worry about -- the iPad is still the king with nearly 50 percent of the market, with Samsung a distant second.

International Data Corporation (IDC) announced its tablet shipments data for the holiday quarter on Thursday morning, and the numbers eclipsed predictions with a whopping 52.5 million units sold worldwide during the last three months of 2012.

For those keeping score, that's a 75.3 percent year over year increase from Q4 2011, when all tablet makers combined shipped a mere 29.9 million units. The unit numbers are even a big jump from the previous Q3 2012 shipments of 30.1 million, an increase of 74.3 percent. So yeah, people were buying tablets -- and a lot of them -- for Christmas last year.

Again topping the list for worldwide tablet shipments is Apple with 22.9 million iPads in Q4 2012, giving Cupertino the market share lead by a wide margin with 43.6 percent. Sure, that may be a far cry from the days when they had the market almost all to themselves, but there's plenty of competition now.

Samsung comes in a distant second place with 7.9 million units and only 15.1 percent of the market, followed by Amazon with 6.0 million (11.5 percent), ASUS with 3.1 million (5.8 percent) and Barnes & Noble ranked fifth with 1.0 million for 1.9 percent of the market.

That just leaves 11.6 million units shipped by everyone else, making up 22.1 percent of the market -- but it's not very good news for those companies not named after a piece of fruit.

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