Apple loses ground to Android in tablet biz

Apple may have topped the US smartphone chart in Q4 2011, thanks to the iPhone 4S, but it needs a revamped iPad if it's to reverse the trend in the tablet market. According to Strategy Analytics, a market watcher, world tablet shipments topped 26.8m units in the last three months of 2011 - 66.9m in the year as a whole - giving …

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called competition, something that is healthy for all of us

[ThomH]

It sounds like it's healthy for the manufacturers too — my summary of the article would be: sales up all around, with the market growing faster than any individual manufacturer.

[technohead95]

Correction...

"Full-year shipments totalled 66.9m tablets, up 260 per cent from the 18.6m units that shipped in 2012."

Shouldn't that say 2010? Also, 66.9m is 360% up from 18.6m.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, 66.9m is 360% up from 18.6m

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep

It's 359.67%

[Drat]

Not 360%. The 2011 sales are 360% of the 2010 sales, which makes them "up" 260%. Using your maths if the sales in 2010 were 10 and the sales in 2011 were 5 you would say the sales were up 50%. Hmm you might do well in marketing :)

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2011 sales

are 360% of the 2010 sales.

% is a silly system anyway. Can we just say the 2011 sales are 3.6 times the 2010 sales

[Tinker Tailor Soldier]

What about smaller increments...

Not many market are growing by hundreds of a percent?

[Arctic fox]

I would make a small bet that the MS slate figures for Q4 of this year............

...............were in fact heavily influenced by the release of the pre-beta version of Win 8.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really sure Amazon Fire should even be counted fully as an 'Android' tablet - it runs Android as it's core but Amazon software and the Amazon app store. It's like saying Mac OSX is BSD - sure some of it's core / components may have originated there but 99%+ of users would never know (or care).

Amazon could develop / install AmaDroid as an Android compatible OS and the users would probably not know any different.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until all these multi-vendors fall out with Google (since they bought Motorola) and develop their own Android clones or separate OS - Android shipments could drop very rapidly if it were just Motorola shipping them.

[Pamplemoose]

Analyst Fail - Shipped != Sold

I'd be interested to see how many Android tablets are actually in punters hands as opposed to sitting in a stock room at PC World...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because I know if I was the owner of a large electronics shop, I'd order thousands of extra tablets to store in my warehouse because that's just good business sense.

</sarcasm off>

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you missed all the fire sales then?

[ThomH]

Shipments are a lagging indicator of sales though, surely? So they'll be good for anyone that's been in the market for a while, which at this point probably includes Samsung, Motorola and Apple.

I'd expect the Amazon figures are good too, since there's no middleman to ship to before sale. That is unless Strategy Analytics are calculating shipping totals from components leaving factories, etc.

[Maliciously Crafted Packet]

the Google OS ??

"And, yes, Amazon's Android-based Kindle Fire is one of the key reasons why the Google OS' share increased."

I thought the Kindle Fire was Amazons OS with all the Google hallmarks striped away.

Would be interested to see how the figures break down if Amazon and Nook are shown as separate OS'

[Keep Refrigerated]

Forkin' Hell

Yes you are somewhat correct. Technically, the Android name, and associated Google ecosystem are Android. The OS/distro itself is referred to as Android (a fork, or sort of modified Linux), but it's open source so anyone can use it.

What Amazon have done is created another fork and called it Kindle Fire - therefore Amazon is using Kindle Fire distro and they'll now have to maintain it as a separate branch.

They could merge new changes from the open source part of Android but I suspect that aside from bug fixes they may not bother to introduce new features; they certainly don't seem to be bothering with code names or version numbers. More likely they'll release a new Kindle with new features when the time comes but I could be wrong.

[hexx]

SHIPMENTS != SALES

[cs94njw]

Apple products are premium expensive products. There are more poor people in the world than rich people. Competing, cheaper products are going to sell better than Apple. Apple can't make a cheap version because it will devalue their brand. Google, Windows, etc, are bound to win.