Android grabs quarter of tablet market
Sorry, RIM, almost all of the rest is Apple's
World tablet sales hot up during Q3, it was revealed today. Shipments almost quadrupled year on year, from 4.4m units in Q3 2010 to 16.7m tablets in Q3 2011.
So said market watcher Strategy Analytics, this morning.
Neither SA nor anyone else would be surprised that Apple remained top dog, though with a much-reduced share of the market.
In Q3 2010, it had a 95.5 per cent share. One year on, it only commanded 66.6 per cent of the table market, at least as far as units shipped go.
But when the market grew 280 per cent, that's not real loss.
Android left Q3 2011 wil 26.9 per cent of the tablet market, up from 2.3 per cent in Q3 2010.
Microsoft managed to eke out a 2.4 per cent share, double RIM's, because 400,000 tablets shipped with its OS. Only 200,000 PlayBooks shipped in the same period.
Yet 500,000 tablets based on other OSes shipped in Q3. Many of them, we'd say, were WebOS devices flogged of by HP.
SA didn't break down the multi-vendor Android share, though senior SA analyst Neil Mawston told Reg Hardware that Samsung and Acer are the two majority players, with Motorola and Asus trailing behind.
Android and Apple had 93.5 per cent of the market in Q3. That can only improve in Q4 as Amazon's Kindle Fire debuts to Google's benefit, and HP disappears from the picture completely.
Yes, RIM has cut the price of the PlayBook, but we don't see that upping its numbers significantly, and nothing SA said suggests it disagrees. ®
COMMENTS
This is clearly not true
We know that there were not 6million android tablets sold in Q3, because Andy Rubin just told us that there have only been 6 milion android tablets sold in entirety. If there were 6million android tabs shipped then sell-through is pretty terrible.
Guff
Eh. Shipments versus sales. There is little chance that that many Android tablets have actually been sold as opposed to shipped from Samsung etc to a large warehouse outside Milton Keynes. There are very large warehouses full of them. Particularly those that were destined for Oz. This is total fantasy. On the basis on my daily commute on one of London's busiest train lines the only tablets out there are iPads and Kindle book readers. I have seen only two non-Applezon tablets in the wild in the last 3 months. Sure it may not be a perfect sample, but there's just no evidence that many people have acutally bought anything other than an iPad or a Kindle. This report is total guff
Since when did units shipped mean anything? They could all be sitting on shop shelves/in warehouses gathering dust. How many have they SOLD? You can't equate units shipped to units sold, that's incredibly lazy. The fact they're using 'units shipped' rather than 'units sold' suggests the former is a significantly larger number than the latter.
One stat I read suggested there were roughly 4.5m android tablets 'in use' as of recently. If you're shipping 16M a quarter but selling 4.5M a year, that's not exactly a roaring success. Especially when up to half a million of your sales were at a humungous loss.
Amazon's Fire will certainly give the Apple iSlab some serious competition, up until that point all we've got from this lot is a smokescreen.
As an aside, I'm currently waiting on delivery of an Android table for work evaluation purposes. Which means I now count on the actual useful statistics they don't seem to want to mention.
Jon
A big change in pricing will be required for top performing tablets as the market has already shown that people currently want an iPad, not a tablet. Shipped numbers are meaningless.
again, again..."shipped" not sold
I call BS on these figures, shipped into the channels is NOT sold to the customer.
