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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. ®

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