Android Grows Tablet Market

"Google’s Android is beginning to make its presence felt in the tablet arena, after Strategy Analytics revealed that more than 4.5 million Android tablets shipped in the third quarter, making up 27 percent of the market shipments.

"Android’s tablet share however still pales in comparison to the 67 percent table share enjoyed by Apple’s iPad, which the company said earlier this week sold 11.1 million units, and over 32 million units since its launch in April 2010."

Android Grows Tablet Market Share Against iPad | eWEEK Europe UK

There is a kind of hubris which has overtaken the Apple consumers, well more than normal. Hardcore Apple users have never been short of hubris, even when their company was a on the verge of collapse and needed to be bailed out by Microsoft. And even when it turns out that their heroes have feet of clay, delaying life saving cancer treatment to pursue new age healing, the Apple community is just certain that we now live in a total technology monopoly, one Microsoft and Google could never imagine.

They simply are refusing to see reality.

Apple has been a very innovative player in bringing smarter web 3.0 devices to consumers. But Apple's model of locking OS to hardware and its tendency to sell at the high end of the market has one key flaw: Apple asks that consumer with less money simply do without a phone, tablet or laptop. They also ask the mass of hardware producer to volunteer to go off and die.

Sooner of later the hardware makers who are not Apple and the consumer who can not afford Apple meet. They produce better and better products until even the Apple users start to take notice and leave the technology.

In our own iPhone and Tablet usage we have seen a shift over the past 2 years in the lab. 2 years our entire project team used iPhones. When the iPad came out we purchased them.

Over the past six months this has shifted solidly to Android based devices. Though we find the zoom a bit buggy, to be honest we find the iPad to be crash prone as well. Samsung and HTC technology is very solid and the most innovative new breed of devices are entirely in the Android space. Only Android is offering hybrid class of devices that function both as a laptop and tablet. This makes perfect sense for the users, but for Apple the idea of comprising the two profit making laptop and tablet markets prevents them from doing this.

Apple is often trapped by its own market logic. For example we use Windows 7 touch screens and Apple OS X Lion machines. We love our lions, but why can't the screens be touch enabled? The only answer we can come up with it that touch enable lion screens might reduce sales of iPads.

So we are not surprised to see Android market emerging. We expect the tablet industry to follow the PC and smartphone market. Apple came out with early innovative products to have first Microsoft and then Google to take that market away from them. Today Google's Android based phones outsell Apple iPhone 2 to 1.

We see no reason to suppose that the iPad is some magic toy that will avoid a well established pattern.