Research Firm: Android Tablets to Account for 28% of Market Share in 2015
Another look into Android’s time machine, today, has led some analysts – particularly those from IMS Research – to believe that, by 2015, Android tablets will account for 28.4% of the market share which will be shared with RIM’s PlayBook, Apple’s iPad, HP-Palm’s webOS, and Microsoft’s Windows (no version was specified, of course.) According to them, 15 major suppliers – including Samsung, Acer, Cisco, and Dell – will be responsible for Android’s growth in this sector.
Looking at 2011 alone, they expect Android tablets will account for 15.2% of the market share sometime in 2011. It’s hard to dispute their expectations considering Google themselves are said to be engineering Honeycomb – the next iteration after Gingerbread – for tablets. Along with Honeycomb, we should be seeing device launches starting early in 2011 from manufacturers such as Acer and Motorola with the Tegra 2 chipset in tow, while Samsung’s already got their head start with the Samsung Galaxy Tab now available for every imaginable region (and which they expect to sell 1 million units of before the end of this year.)
Still, iPad will continue to eat up a majority of that market with iSuppli forecasting shipments to reach 13.8 million units this year, a part of the 15.6 million they expect to ship overall from all major players. Next year, 57.3 million tablets are expected to be shipped with 43.7 million of them being iPads. Over time, we’re sure to see this wide margin diminish, but I can’t imagine the dent will be made as fast as most competitors would hope. With Honeycomb and all that we expect it to bring (which NVIDIA’s CEO says will be nearly unidentifiable to your average Android user), we’ll see if the tablet race will go from the mass of rehashed junk it currently is to a very serious competitor to Apple and the stronghold they’ve established .
[via Reuters]