I'm sure a lot will say now that "It was inevitable. Android is made up of multiple OEM's, yadda, yadda...".<p>But I seem to remember not too long ago that "iPad was the iPod of tablets" or something, and therefore will always have 80+ percent market share. I guess that didn't turn out true.
The tablet market is not like the phone market. In many ways, it will be easier for Android to gain market share, since the channel isn't controlled by carriers in some markets. Any OEM can enter this business, and many many will.<p>Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.<p>Tablets will be the inexpensive personal internet access device for Asian markets that now rely on internet cafes. Apple will take only the luxury market here, but will make plenty of money at that.<p>Tablets will displace PCs from the desks and especially the non-desk-bound workers in enterprises who can't justify the support costs of a PC. Apple will be a stronger contender here because of their long head start, but Android has some technical advantages as well as cost and choice of OEMs.<p>One thing that's missing is software that takes advantage of tablet power and screen real estate. My prediction is that this will happen first in enterprise software where budgets will support more ambitious software development, and that it's possible it will happen on Android first because it's easier to make a suite of cooperating apps for Android.
I own an Asus TS300 tablet, and one thing comes to my mind, Android is mediocre, I've tried the iPad and the Surface and their quality is 10 times better, so I presume this numbers are due the cheap $59 tablets that have become popular, but just for the price.
Relevant:<p>> I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.<p>> <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance" rel="nofollow">http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance</a><p>> There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.<p>> <a href="http://www.marco.org/2010/12/31/there-really-isnt-much-of-a-tablet-market" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2010/12/31/there-really-isnt-much-of-a-...</a>
Minor point, but from a business perspective, this isn't helping hardware vendors. They are selling a nearly zero margin product. Apple's taking the profits, everyone else is fighting for the leftovers, the unprofitable part of the market.<p>This is to be expected from the flood of $100 Android tablets, but to be honest this isn't hurting Apple, this is hurting Microsoft.<p>Apple has their very profitable segment of the market, Android is taking the low end, and there just isn't much of a place for Windows tablets.
Wait, wait. So in a quarter where the newest iPad is 6 months old, there were less iPads sold than every Android tablet manufacturer in the world combined?<p>APPLE IS DOOMED
Stories like this are interesting me because while sales numbers show Android doing well, usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets, at least not in the numbers people are using iPads.<p>And then you read the last paragraph and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.<p>><i>And while Android appears to be making headway against Apple and the iPad, the truth is that Apple remains the top selling tablet brand by a huge margin. While Apple sold the aforementioned 14.5 million tablets from April through June, Samsung was the closest competitor to the Cupertino based manufacturer with 8.1 million tablets sold. in the period.
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