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IDC: Android tablets won’t overtake the iPad until 2016, holding their own for now

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With the release of the new iPad analytics firm IDC is upping their tablet forecast for 2012. Their unit forecast has been bumped up from 87.7 million to 106.1 million but the lion’s share of those devices are still predicted to run iOS. IDC’s current model doesn’t have slates running Google’s Android overtaking Apple’s tablet until 2016 despite strong growth in 2011. At the forefront of that growth was the Kindle Fire.

During the final quarter of 2011 Amazon’s $199 media tablet made up 16.8 percent of all tablets sold. To put that in perspective, Android tablets held 44.6 percent of the market in total. Other manufacturers buoying the Android cause included Samsung and Barnes & Noble. While Samsung’s Galaxy Tab series offers a more “traditional” tablet experience, the strong showing from Amazon and B&N suggests consumers can be won with the right combination of price and functionality. It isn’t all about quad-core processors and HD displays. Doing the math (and accounting for the slight blip that is RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook), that leaves a 54.7 percent share for the iPad.

Overall tablet growth was up, with a 155 percent increase in sales quarter-over-quarter.

[via TechCrunch]

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44 Comments

  1. I can see that. Android users are usually sensible and will probably already own a smartphone, desktop and laptop so the utility tablets bring will be minimal.

  2. Uh, somebody better start accounting for Windows 8. Windows currently sits on 90%+ of the world’s computers, and you’re insane if you don’t think corporations, enterprises, small businesses, IT depts., schools, universities and then your average joe won’t want a portable/100% compatible device with their desktop/laptop/server. I like Android as much as the next guy, and Apple’s reign in the tablet sector will come to an end in the next 2-3 years, but Windows 8 will play a huge role in that. Just sayin’.

    1. Yeh, though they haven;t got a great smartphone marketshare, I think their tablet share will do better.

      Also, I wonder if the rumored nexus tablet will have any effect on marketshare, perhaps it will just change the direction android OEMS will go with their design and that may indirectly effect sales

      1. I would have to think it will. A 200-250 Android tablet from Google is going to make a splash. I have some buddies who really don’t think they need tablets and in reality, no one does…lol. So they are reluctant to spend $500+ on an iPad for something that is marginally useful for more then games and photos. It’s easier to sleep at night knowing you only spent $200.

        1. I doubt it will be sold for that little amount of money seeing as Nexus devices have never been about setting sale records and therewith never came cheap. Unless a tablet nexus has a different goal entirely.

          Even for that price, I still wouldn’t get a tablet, unless they find a great use for it. I’d rather buy a Google TV device

    2. Not sure you can look at it that way. Companies are notoriously slow to upgrade Windows. Just a couple of years before Vista came out I was at a fortune 100 that was just upgrading to XP. Its gonna be a 50/50 thing for windows 8.

    3. Yeah, we heard that about the Windows 7 phones too. They are still loosing market share. Windows 8, which I’m running as a preview on my PC is horrible. It runs fine, but I can’t stand the new look and these damn tiles. I don’t think the Windows tablets will have the impact you think they will. 

      1. I would never put Windows 8 on a desktop or a laptop, but it might be successful on tablets.

    4. Pricing will dictate.  Last Win8 tablet I saw was $1000.  If that doesn’t drastically change, it’ll go the way their phones are going now, downward into oblivion.

      1. why would you possibly think that a win 8 tab would be $1000? imo that isn’t even a possibly considering he competition and current pricepoints

        1. http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/tablet-pcs/XE700T1A-A01US? 

          I stand corrected, it was Win7, but the question of pricing is still the main point I was making.  How much cheaper can they make a Win8 tablet compared to a Win7 tablet?  If they can’t, only business people will have them, the average Joe will go with a different OS tablet to save money.

          1. well my laptop cost just shy of £400 and the only change would be a touchscreen added and keyboard (trackpad) taken away + it has 6GB of ram so a win8 tab would kill, especially if it had a keyboard dock.

    5. That’s very true. I never though windows phone was going to fly, but tablets aren’t phones. I don’t think it would have as much success as it would on laptops, but I think windows 8 will be fine on tablets if the prices are competitive with android. As much as I like to knock windows, neither IOS nor android is nearly as convenient as windows for my purposes. If I can run all windows apps and attach to any external device I want as if it was a pc, it’s a winner. I absolutely can’t do that with an ipad, and that’s a hit and miss with android (mostly misses).

  3. If the windows tablet runs the same apps as my pc its on, to be able to play my pc games on it would be awesome  

  4. Interesting how they forecast this very sharp decline in share growth for Android tablets. I call BS. How does the share double in the first two and then slow to a complete crawl. There has been a concerted effort on the part of the media to keep Android tablet sales under wraps. How do you capture 44% of sales and still get labeled as having a small share of the market. Then when Android outpaces iOS in tablet sales they’ll switch to user base as the new measuring stick. Come on Android blogs. Start calling out the BS.

    1. I agree. Engadget is by far the worst, but my local news stations also have really BS pro-Apple articles every once in a while.

      Last year, there was an article praising Apple because an iPhone 4 that was in a protective case fell out of a skydiver’s pocket up in the air. When the guy found the phone on the ground, it was extremely badly damaged, but he was still able to call the phone, which was what the article was about.

      I’m 99% sure that Apple pays blogs and news stations every once in a while to have biased articles.

      1. Thing is Engadget actually got better after the shakeup. But they are still bad. 

        And me and my wife wholeheartedly believe one of our local stations has to be paid by Apple. Any story in which an iPhone is used becomes all about the iPhone. Bank robbery…somebody calls out from the bank to the police….one main point of the story is that its an iPhone. And this is like every other day. Now whenever another phone is in use its just a phone or cell phone. But they go out of their way with inflection and everything to make note of an iPhone as if they’ve discovered some new amazing use for the thing…like making a phone call.

        I believe all these organizations have bought Apple stock.

        1. the best story I saw on youtube was when a phone robber took a picture of himself off a robbed phone and it auto-uploaded to facebook, the news media presumed “wrongly” that is was an iphone (can it auto upload to anywhere but icloud?) and then went on to praise Steve jobs as a visionary etc etc.

      2.  Engadget is from AOL. Don’t ever forget that.

  5. IPad 3 is cool but hardware is lacking. The screen is the best of the best. People love what’s on the outside instead of the inside. Damn the screen is sexy. Android needs to step up. The screen is the key people.

    1. It’s LCD. I won’t own another tablet until it’s Super Amoled Plus – Look at any Super Amoled Plus screen, even at a lower resolution, it makes Apples look shameful. Apple went as far as to up the saturation level in the new iPad, which they had already said before was fine and a more “true” representation of color… now they up it just to complete with Super Amoled. I’m telling you this, a super amoled plus screen at 1920 x 1080 would blow the iPad screen out of the water. The resolution on the new iPad is a marketing gimmick and an un-needed resolution. 

      1.  Dude, when I compare the screens between the gnex and my iphone4s the iphone blows away the gnex in quality and resolution. I can actually see the pixels on the gnex where I cant on the iphone.

        And why is it that the gnex cant produce a white color, its either blueish or grayish.

        1. Really? Lets all see for ourselves.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvO3x_jTzFY

          Does that look like higher quality for the iPhone to you?

          I have a GNex and friends with iPhone 4s. They basically can’t say anything once they see my screen. And Apple themselves claimed that 300ppi was the threshold at which the eye couldn’t see pixels from a normal viewing distance. The GNex has 316 ppi. So how exactly are you seeing the pixels….by holding it on your nose? GTFOH with that bullsh!t. You probably haven’t so much as put a finger on a Galaxy Nexus.

        2. haha funny guy funny guy, of course 720p screen is worst than 640p. Thats why I bought a 51″ 1080p 3D tv instead of some standard definition TV /s

      2. Right again. The truth isn’t being told. HD Super AMOLED is the best thing out there hands down. But when compared the iFans want to simply look at the ppi and say they are pretty equal which is far from the case when you lay eyes on the two.

        1.  and the screen size is bigger than iphone which makes browsing more fun!

    2.  How come nobody said the ‘screen is the key’ when every android was beating ipad on screen resolution? And nobody will say ‘screen is the key’ once Samsung comes out with that 2560×1600 beast tablet.

  6. This is a horseshit chart and these fooles have been wrong before:  

    http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/idc-windows-phone-7-to-be-second-only-to-android-by-2015-20110329/

    These are the guys who said windows phone 7 would be second only to Android by 2015 – Beating out iOS soundly… This is not happening. For starters, windows phone 8 will hit before then so they are running on phones and tablets. Windows phone 7 was a COMPLETE flop and so are IDC predictions. 

    Mark my words… Android tablet shares will overtake iOS by early 2013 after the 2012 holiday season if not before. Samsung will play a much larger role. As we’ve seen with the Galaxy Note… the Note 10.1 will have very good sales along with the others.

    1. Exactly. How do they explain the sharp decrease in adoption the are forecasting? The first and second iPads were hot and Android still quickly snagged almost half of the market. So what about the new ipad is going to slow that down?

    2. Plus, the new iPad has really shitty specs, which is going to help Android’s market share.

      The new iPad has an outdated 1 GHz dual-core processor, it’s heavier than the iPad 2, and its screen has too many pixels for a tablet, which is going to greatly slow the device down.

  7. Last year I believe they were predicting Android takeover in 2015.  What doesn’t make sense with this chart is why this years predictions are so small in growth for Android, especially considering how many top quality tablets are to be released with ICS.  I’d say 2015 is closer to reality than what is portrayed here.

  8. Their model’s too conservative. In terms of quarterly sales, Android will overtake the iPad by the end of the year. Overall, Android should overtake the iPad in about 12-18 months. They may not have accounted for the replacement cycle.

    http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2012/03/new-ipad-tablet-market.html

  9. Do you notice that the new iPad resolution is exactly double the resolution of iPad2 ? Apple intends it that way to preserve app compatibility. Imagine if the resolution of the new iPad is 1920 x 1200, it will mess up existing app.

    Thus you will never see any other iPad with any different resolution. 

    1. well if it has the same dimensions then it was always going to be proportional

  10. All Apple does is release a new version every few months, that’s how Apple keeps drumming sales in.  In under 2 years, they’re already on 3.  That’s how they keep their customers coming.  Keep the super techies wanting more while they sell the outmoded models at a a discounted price.

  11. Why did they just decide that Android would go from phenomenal growth in 2011-2012 to almost nothing for the next four years??? It will not take that long.

  12. IPad is the worst tablet ever made. Even the kindle fire run laps around it. At $199 or less the Android army cartel will destroy the iPad in terms of market share. I’ll give it another year. Who wants to pay $499 for a crappy iPad just because they put “new” in front of the iPad. $499 is just silly to pay for a tablet. Only apple can command that much from their loyalist sheeps. Android ftw

    1. Lmao! Wow you’re either blind or stupid, so iPad is a piece of crap?? That’s why it’s the #1 tablet on the planet, no way in hell will the crappy kindle ever touch an iPad. Best resolution best OS that was meant to run on the tablet, resolution no one can’t touch, man I could go on forever, get out from under the rock and wake up to the fact that no other tablet comes close to an iPad in any category, android ftw , gimme a break lol

      1. who invited this hater

        1.  ultimatedroidfanz…

      2. whoa bro. I think he was just saying that it’s a little expensive and the new iPad is not that much of a step-up from the old one. I’d also like to point out that the OS was meant to run on a phone sized device, that was what it was designed for. 

  13. Ehhh wrong! By then apples tablet will still be in control. And the fanboys say ” but wait the new iPad specs are similar to the older one, and it doesn’t have a quad core
    Processor and bla bla” guess what, it doesn’t matter how many cores and all that bull it has it’s still more efficient and fluid and intuitive than any android tablet on the market, it’s nkt about having the bigger engine, it’s more about using it efficiently and getting the most out of it, that’s where android devices fail.

  14. Analysts are self serving bullshiters of which always have an invested interest in the products that they say will be on top.

  15. And rightfully so. Android’s offering has been dismal to say the least. Shame on the people here that continue to defend garbage products. How long has ICS been out and how many tablets are using it? You should demand better.

    The iPad set a new bar. Apple has its act together.

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