Android bites big chunk out of Apple iPad market share The world's computer makers shipped 17.6m tablets during 2010, 9.7m of them in Q4 alone. It'll surprise no one that the full-year total was dominated by Apple, which shipped 14.8m iPads during the year - it was actually on sale for just nine months or so - or 84.1 per cent of the total, numbers from market watcher Strategy …
Thing is, Android was always going to grab a share of the market, but how much of that was latent demand from people who didn't want an iPad, and were waiting.
If you have 100% of the Market and there's a new entrant, you have to loose market share, how is that News?
What would be more interesting is would be the rate growth in iPad sales with and without Android, and the rate of growth for the market, to see which is out performing the other in growth rate. Tricky, I know if yo only have Q4, but there's still far more useful data than market share alone.
"Android came equally out of nowhere to capture 2.3 per cent of the market with total shipments of 2.3 units, by far the majority of them being Samsung Galaxy Tabs."
I myself have just bought 0.3 of those Galaxy Tabs. I was considering it for a long time, so it falls into two book-keeping years.
(No, they weren't thinking of the Android 2.3 software release, "Gingivitis", or anyway should not have been.)
Also, I bought my Galaxy at Tesco for 0.9 of the typical price. Offer lasts till about 0.3 of the way through February, and, presumably, while stocks last, which I can't think of anything funny for.
(Except that I don't usually pay even that much for my chocolate. Except for that LG candy bar...)
Interestingly, an adult male sock fits it rather well. On the other hand, baby socks for your smaller smartphone do not have VAT added at the rate of 0.2.
Actually that will do: buy it while your stockings last! Hooray!
http://www.eurodroid.com/2011/01/more-stats-android-took-22-of-the-tablet-market-in-q4-2010/
As well as tearing into the lead in the smartphone space, Android is now gaining traction in the tablet world. Data from Strategy Analytics claims Android accounted for 22 percent of the 9.7 million tablet computers sold in the last quarter of 2010 – still quite a distance behind Apple’s 75% iPad stranglehold.
Another day, another el-reg fail
Do you do this to wind us up, waste our time, or both?
"The world's computer makers shipped 17.6m tablets during 2010, 9.7m of them in Q4 alone."
OK. That's 17.6m units shipped in 2010.
"Android came equally out of nowhere to capture 2.3 per cent of the market with total shipments of 2.3 units, by far the majority of them being Samsung Galaxy Tabs."
Is that 2.3% of 2.3m units? Maybe not. because that would mean 1% = 1m, so 100% would be 100m units. But apparently only 17.6m units were shipped.
2.3m units is (2.3 / 17.6) * 100% = 13% percent.
If the writer had provided a link to his source data, at least one could work out what was meant.
I think some of those figures are wrong, or the wording is or something.
Anyway I think it's fairly obvious that a tidal wave of android powered tablets is coming this year and I would not be surprised if they represent > 50% sales by the end of it. There will be fairly reasonable tablets costing close to half what the iPad currently does.
The biggest fly in the ointment is Android 3.0 which really needs to be out and ready before manufacturers can let rip. The current Honeycomb preview edition in the SDK raises some doubts in my mind if/when the OS will be ready.
The claim is that marketshare alone is the measure of success. Thus, if you invent a new category of device such as the phone OS tablet, and you are the only one in the market for a year with that device, it is a sign of your decline that a competitor has finally arrived and has sold some tablets too in the second year. I would think the real comparison would be year over year sales of the first device. For example, will Apple sell more or fewer tablets in 2011 than in 2010? If it is more, then the fact that the market is now bigger and diverse does not mean that the market for the first device has declined.
The Android will never be much of a tablet platform, the author is forgetting the iPad 2 is coming in a few months which will further reduce the percentage of Android tablets sold. Apple for at least the next decade will have around 90% share of the tablet market.
Everyone wants the iPad since that's where all the software is, where the developers are and the "best value" hardware will always be. So everyone needs to keep that in mind.
See this isn't like the desktop, where outside a few select niches you're taking a great risk in spending money to develop for anything that isn't Windows. You should check the Android Marketplace out some time. Plenty of developers and plenty of download counts for the popular apps.
Anyway, "best value" is highly debatable. I'm sure that as long as the screen is capacitive, the chips are at least half decent and the price is less than half a wifi+3g iPad, plenty of people are going to look at a market of 100,000 or so apps and climbing and think that's a pretty sweet deal. Like it or not the droid is here to stay and it's not just biting a chunk out of Apple's market share, but the cheaper devices out there are serving a long tail that Apple aren't interested in: People not willing to pay iPad prices for a pretty toy computer/terminal.
Now wouldn't you, as a developer, want a slice of that growing userbase's app expenditure?
The PRESIDENT of Samsung just admitted in their earnings call that Galaxy sales were 'quite small' to end users and that all the vaunted, fanboy dreaming 2.3% (geez, you guys are getting so desperate!) is really nothing.
iHaters will buy an alternative. But there are not enough of you guys to matter. So go ahead, waste your money.
...is spending $500/year on upgrading something that does what you can already do, in a different enclosure.
iPad still isn't warming my cockles, and I got one before it arrived in the UK, I develop for it, I even like the "idea" of it. It's just not as ubiquitous as the iPhone; it's great for a lot of people but pretty pointless for others.
Lucky for me I'm nobody's fanboi.
Apple will continue to have the advantage even if Android tablets take off. They're still a hardware company, and even if end up only supplying 25% of the market, that's 25% of the total market in their pocket, not divvied up among a dozen companies, and for a device that can't exist without a "real" computer to plug into, iTunes is the real linchpin. Take that away and it's a paperweight.
This is only Day 2 in the tablet era. Lets just hope the innovation hasn't dried up already...:p
.....hating something and not being especially impressed with something. I do not hate the iPad, I am simply unimpressed. In order to hate something it has to be (in the negative sense) important to you. The iPad is not important. That it gives many people a lot of pleasure I think is fine, it is just irrelevant to me. You see?
Another day, another prod at the geeks. Rise up, little souls, and argue! (ps don't forget to click on a few ads while you're frothing at the mouth about closed platforms and throwing insults at each other).
My 2peth - sure, android will do huge things, but that single platform is appealing to corps in more tham one way: do you see Tesco advertising their android app? Are BT advertising their Wifi using a samsung galaxy tab?
I know, it's fickle, but the homogenous nature of the infrastructure appeals to suits... And not to geeks. The geeks won't inherit the earth, because they're usually too busy arguing about the ethics of open systems, Apis, who owns the device, etc etc etc etc...
Ultimately, the public (80/20 rule - 80% don't care?) will go with the popular shiny choice. Which at the moment looks like apple shaped gear.
No judgements - just trying to call it like I see it.
"This is a new market, just starting and of course the initial player is going to have its dominance challenged and reduced."
Archos offered Android tablets before the iPad was even announced. Apple's rarely the first to do anything, yet news agencies constantly repeat the same garbage that all these devices were Apple's ideas and everyone else is copying them. When people go to you as their source of information, could you maybe try to be a bit more factual? Thanks.
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