Apple to dominate tablet biz through 2015
Tough time ahead for WebOS, BlackBerry
Apple's iOS may be forecast to lose smartphone market share even to Microsoft's Windows Phone, but it will remain the leader in the media tablet arena through to 2016.
So suggests research house Gartner, which puts iOS' share of the 2015 294.1m-unit market at 47.1 per cent.
That's an inevitable significant reduction on Apple's 2010 market share of 83.9 per cent, but what will more than compensate the company for this loss is the gain in unit shipments. In 2015, Apple will ship 9.4 times as many iPads - 138.5m to 14.8m - as it did in 2010.
Apple's 2011 market share: 68.7 per cent, says Gartner.
No surprises for guessing that Android will be iOS' key rival, taking 38.6 per cent of the tablet in 2015, according to Gartner. It'll take 19.9 per cent this year.
The problem for tablet makers will be making their Android tablets stand out from everyone else's Android tablets. If they're not careful, punters' brand loyalty will be to the OS not the manufacturer. Yet the greater control Google is taking over vendors' implementations of Android 3.0 Honeycomb means it will be hard to use price as a differentiator, Gartner said.
Yet third-placed QNX, due for a big boost now that RIM is using it as the basis for the BlackBerry PlayBook, will only have taken ten per cent of the tablet market by 2015. Too few developers, and lack of compatibility between PlayBook and all the BlackBerry smartphones currently out there, will hinder the tablet's success, Gartner said.
HP's acquired-with-Palm WebOS will have just three per cent of the market that year, down from a peak of four per cent in 2011, the researcher reckons. Its appeal will remain limited until HP figures out how to sell a lot more Palm smartphones.
All the other tablet OSes will amount to 1.2 per cent of the market, down from 1.7 per cent in 2011 and 2012. ®
COMMENTS
Boring
This argument is getting boring.
Just because /you/ can't see a need for tablets, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot of buying (with a 'u') one.
Maybe you think everyone else is an idiot for not putting spaces in front of their punctuation too. Doesn't make you right...
rant mode
Who pays for/reads all this pseudo-rigorous marketing crap? Which random number generator do they get their figures from? Who the hell knows how many iPads will be sold in four years time - and who can predict that iOS will have 47.1% of the market - not 47.2 or 47.0 or even 'around half', but precisely 47.1% - I doubt whether Apple could predict how many they'll sell next month to that level of precision, never mind in four years time.
Does anyone have their predictions from 2006 of how many iPads would sell last year? How close was their guess?
Why do we waste oxygen on these 'market analysts'? Why don't they just piss off to the bookies and put their oracular skills to the test with their own money?
</rant>
@S2S
Perhaps if you used a tablet instead of a smartphone you'd be able to type a reply that didn't look like it'd be written by a 12 year old?
Either that or you just need to learn to spell and type?
@S2S
Ahhh, the old "I can't think of a use for, or can't afford a tablet, so that means they're useless and nobody in the rest of the world needs one" logic.
Based on your own argument that only idiots buy tablets, you would seem to be a prime candidate for one.
Really?
If you believe the claptrap that comes out of Gartner, then the Nintendo DS would have been DOA (dead on arrival) when it first launched in 2005
