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

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

Android has become the biggest tablet operating system with 62% of the market. In 2012, Google'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% share, compared to 53.3 million units and a 45.8% 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% to 36%.

Microsoft's Windows tablet sales improved but the share remained small at 2.1%, 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 %. The expansion and 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% slice of the market.

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

However, Lenovo is still behind Asus, with 11 million units sold, and Amazon, with 9.4 million. Asus' market share grew from 5.4% to 5.6%, while Amazon's share declined from 6.6% to 4.8%.

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