One tablet to rule them all, anyone? The latest figures suggest that Android’s not making a great deal of headway against Apple’s uber-popular tablet solution, and may not take significant share for many years.
Gartner’s figures for tablet sales are rather sobering stuff if you’re an Android fanatic, and it’s not much better until at least 2015.
First of all, this year’s figures. It’s expected that 63.6 million tablets will sell this year, up a stunning 261 per cent from last year. Apple’s expected to hold 73.4 per cent of the market; Android only 17 per cent, with the remaining near 10 per cent being Playbooks and HP TouchPads — although that’s almost certainly a rather stagnant market figure for TouchPads.
By 2015, it’s expected that the Tablet market will amount to around 326 million devices, of which 149 million would be expected to be iPads and 116 million Android tablets. RIM’s expected to shift around 26 million Playbooks, eclipsed already by Windows 8 tablets, which Gartner estimates to be around 34 million units by that stage.
Predictions are still just that; it’s not an absolute science but a forecast of the way the market might go. Having said that, the figures for this year do still show a lot of iPad market dominance. I’ve pondered on why this is so rather extensively recently — what’s your take on the current and future Android market? [Gartner via ITNews]