Android grabs quarter of tablet market 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 …
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
Aww.. yet another iFanboy screeching about the dishonesty of the statistic that is showing the all powerful Apple in a less than devotional glow, while trying desperately deny the fact that the iPad, like the iphone has peaked, and is going to be losing percentage of market share from now on.
What you can do..
1) Claim that Apple is only one company. And can't be expected to compete with everybody else.. Again.
2) Brag about how much you are being over cha.. Ahem.. How much more profit Apple is making than anybody else.
3) Claim that market share is not important.
4) Face reality, and discover that in fact, it's a consumer electronics product, not a religious icon. And it really doesn't matter which is the most popular, because nobody outside a bunch of pathetic people care either way.
...the cheap unbranded tablets sold on Amazon for sometimes less than £100? I suspect these maybe don't make it onto official figures. In any case the iPads will still dominate in terms of value, if not numbers. I have no axe to grind in the pitiless eternal war between Apple and Android, by the way.
Just like smartphones, before you know it, Android will have 50% of the tablet market, and then 75% of it.
Nobody wants a locked in ecosystem where content and apps you buy only work on Apple products. Consumers are waking up that buying Android not only means a much wider market (from £99 supermarket budget tablets to £400 luxury high end ones), it also means any investment in apps will always remain yours, you can use them on ALL your Android devices not just now, but in the future too.
"Buy once, use forever", rather than Apple's "Buy once, hand back at the gate when you want to defect" approach.
I can only assume you've never used an Android tablet - or at least tried to download apps on to one.
Just because an app works on Android device A doesn't mean it will work on device B, even if they are running the same version of Android. The Android market is quite fragmented at the moment and if I knew then what I know now, I'd have gone for an iPad, not an Android.
And what's with the efforts being made by some manufacturers to ensure their devices can't be rooted? This is worse than Apple - at least they are honest and upfront about not wanting you to hack their products.
These are not commoditized devices and they are not sold or bought like a Tesco grocery.
As a result the decision to buy or not to buy is based predominantly on features and capabilities and strength of the product, not price as such. It takes SUPERDEEP discounts to change that picture. A shallow discount like the ones done by RIM is not good enough. In fact, we are still at a stage in the market development when the same money which was discounted would have resulted in better result if put into product development.
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
I've frequently said that charging stupid money for Android is a bad idea. People who are going to spend a fortune on a tablet will buy an iPad. But lots of people either cannot or will not pay stupid money and android devices will clean up if they sell for a lower price.
I can buy a €300 android 3.2 10" device right now and I expect before long that most high end devices will be €350 or less for their base models.
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