During this holiday season, there's a good chance you either got a new phone or purchased one for someone else. Smartphones are excellent gifts to both give and receive, and now that the holiday rush is starting to die down, it's time to take a look at activations of new phones to see which companies owned the market this year.

On the global front , Samsung saw a strong second place position in the week leading up to Christmas. The company accounted for 26% of all smartphone activations, creating a 5% year-over-year growth compared to this time in 2016. Huawei followed up in third place with 5% of all activations, with Xiaomi, Motorola, and LG making up the rest of the top five at 3% each. As for first place, Apple saw a big win at the number one spot with 44% of all activations.

As you can see from the graph above, Google's nowhere to be seen despite releasing the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL back in October. Google still has a lot of work to do when it comes to establishing a strong global presence, but when we look at smartphone activations during the Christmas weekend in the U.S. only, we end up with a different story.

In this scenario, Google took both first and second place with the Pixel 2 seeing a 38.61% increase in sales during the Christmas weekend compared to weeks prior. As for the Pixel 2 XL, it followed up with 31.41%. Localytics attributes this strong performance to the various promotions that were offered by Best Buy, Verizon, and the Google Store, and considering that you could get up to $300 off a Pixel 2 by simply activating it on Verizon with a monthly installment plan, that makes perfectly good sense.