Good sales of Amazon Kindle Fire tablet led to significant gains for Google Android operating system in tablet market share during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to new data from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry, which purports to measure application sessions on more than 90 percent of all Android devices, found that Android tablets gained 10 percent share from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011 and now represent 39 percent of the overall tablet market.

The Kindle Fire, which only just debuted this past November, has managed to best Samsung Galaxy Tab in terms of application session usage. The Kindle Fire already represents 35.7 percent of total Android tablet application sessions, while the Galaxy Tab has been reduced to just 35.6 percent, according to Flurry data that accounts for most of January 2012.

The Upcoming Amazon Kindle fire 2nd-generation is now just months away from production and could launch in Q2 of this year. Besides sporting a larger than expected 10-inch display instead of an 8.9-inch screen, this tablet is expected to have NVIDIA quad-core Tegra 3 under the hood. As you know by now, the Amazon Kindle Fire launched last November in time for the holiday season and quickly had Amazon as the number 2 position among global tablet vendors.

Amazon has yet to announce this tablet, but on Thursday, Amazon had placed an order for chassis from the Catcher Technologies plant in Taizhou, China. We take this with the usual grain of salt, including the estimate that Catcher gross margin will be 40% on the order. If true, this could be the signal to expect a new tablet to start undergoing production within the next few months.

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