Global tablet shipments are expected to climb about 78 percent year-over-year in Q1, but will decline 30 percent compared to the fourth quarter.
What remains the same, however, is the fact that Apple controls more than half of the market, while Amazon and Barnes & Noble are the only other major vendors.
Of the 14.97 million tablets predicted by Digitimes Research to ship in Q1, 11 million or 73 percent will be iPad 2 and iPad 3 devices, leaving a little over 26 percent to Android. Amazon's Kindle will hit 1.5 million or about 10 percent share, followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook with 500,000 units and 4 percent share. Combined, these three manufacturers will dominate the tablet market with 87 percent market share.
If Digitimes Research is correct, then it also appears that non-iPad tablets are facing much more serious seasonal peaks in their sales: The company said that non-iPad tablet shipments will decline 51 percent sequentially. In Q1, 83 percent of all tablets shipped globally will have been assembled by Foxconn and about 10 percent by Quanta.
Give it a break bro... Seriously. You ever tried reading a book on your phone? Not that fun, let me tell you. The market response has proven that a Tablet, if done right would sell well. In my line of work I also have a boat load of large documents in PDF format. This provides a way to store all that data, quickly search for the stuff that I need and bring it up in places where a laptop would be a pain in the ass.
Our BestBuy can't tell me when they'll have Acer or Asus or Samsung tablets in stock to sell, again. There's plenty of iPads, though...
Could somebody lie to us because Apple product placements are SO important for revenue?
Actually, IOS passed Android again. There was a article recently about it. Also, allot of the tablet vendors pulled out of the market because they where getting virtually no traction at all. IPad is dominating this particular market.
Here is the article. Not sure where you where getting the 49% - 29% figure. Android and IOS where pretty close. IOS regaining the lead was bound to happen once the phone was on the more than AT&T.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/25/apple-google-microsoft-idUSL5E8CO4QP20120125
Actually, I have both an Android tablet, and a Kindle that was given to my second half as a birthday present. I routinely prefer to read in my Samsung Galaxy S2 for the simple reason that I can make the text quite large and it is very comfortable to carry or be on the thread mill with, but I tend to read books that don't have too many pictures. For reading magazines, I would imagine that your criticism is valid.
Many people out there, in fact probably most, think that in order to read a Kindle book they need a Kindle or an iPad, which is a laughable belief. That is the general level of ignorance going around. I have tried to convince many who plan to buy Kindles to just buy a non proprietary tablet and more often than not they say that they want the Kindle and hide behind some totally weird justification... Of course they could buy a Kindle and root it, but that I would not suggest to such people. And it is true that the 2x cored Kindle Fire at $200 US is a well priced device, and is not a ripoff from Amazon, Unlike the iPad.
ah but thats only counting usa where the church of jobs is almost a real religion, if you count with the rest of the world the numbers arent closte to that
and truthfully many of us europeans stopped caring, what the states does anymore, for me it seems like you guys live in some sort of bizarro world
Actually it was (so typical for iWorld) bullshit.
iOS allegedly surpassed Android IN SALES IN Q4 and only in US I guess. Even in Q4 Samsung alone sold as many smartphones as apple (about 35-37 million).
iPhones MARKET SHARE (not to mistake for a single quarters SALES) is about 18% worldwide, 25% in US. You can't drastically change that number during one quarter.
What's happening is that we have yet another "Hyphnosteve" style "reality distortion" article.
iPad market share:
2010 - 84%
2011 - 69%
2012 - 63% (forecast)
2015 - 47% (forecast)
There is no sign of Apple's market share of tablets NOT shrinking. It's Apple that is losing tablet market share. "non ipad tablet sales will decline 51%" is pure lunacy.
The numbers are entirely consistent.
Apple clearly dominates the tablet market at the moment. The smartphone market, clearly, is also far larger numerically. You say it must not be Android smartphone sales boosting that number, but it is. While iPhone outsells every other phone (indeed I think 3 models of iPhone were in the top 5 of last quarter) - Android isn't just one manufacturer, or one type of phone - it's dozens and dozens. While they all individually fail in comparison to the iPhone, if you add them all up they currently have a larger market share. The larger market share Android has is clearly divided amongst several companies who each have a relatively small piece of the pie.
As for your Bestbuy store anecdote, most iPad users don't buy from there - and BestBuy maybe didn't anticipate much demand for the Acer / Asus or Samsung tablets - since they sell nowhere near as well.