Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market 191
TyFoN writes "Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. ...the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'"
Shipping share vs. market share (Score:4, Informative)
The reported numbers are all shipping share [daringfireball.net], not market share. The number of Android tablets being sold is pretty dramatically less....
Re:Shipping share vs. market share (Score:5, Informative)
As for Android tablets, Robert Synnott suggested on Twitter a way to approximate actual tablets sold. First, five days ago Google CEO Larry Page announced that Android was in use on 135 million total devices. Second, Google’s Android developer site publishes a regularly-updated breakdown of the Android OS version numbers in active use. For the 14-day period ending July 5, 0.9 percent of Android devices were using Android 3.0 or 3.1 — a.k.a. Honeycomb, the versions of Android specifically for — and only for — tablets.
Round that up to an even 1 percent to be generous, multiply by 135 million devices, and you get 1.35 million tablets.
So it looks like Apple has sold, to customers, over 21 times more iPads than all Honeycomb Android tablets combined.
These are Google's own numbers here suggesting that the iPad is still eating their lunch.
Re:Shipping share vs. market share (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really? [techcrunch.com]
Samsung didn’t give any figures, but when a company describes sales of a flagship product as “quite small,” you better believe those sales are microscopic.
As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive and this first quarterly result was quite, you know, fourth-quarter unit [figure] was around two million. Then, in terms of sell-out, we also believe it was quite small. We believe, as the introduction of new device, it was required to have consumers invest in the device. So therefore, even though sell-out wasn’t as fast as we expected, we still believe sell-out was quite OK.
This was back when people were touting the "2 million Galaxy Tabs" sold when in fact that was just the shipped figure and then Samsung is saying the sales were "quite small". Yes, that would lead very much to believe that it is "dramatically less". Otherwise, if the sales were so great why don't they quote the actual sales numbers rather than the shipped numbers? Businesses do this to hide the fact that actual sales suck.
This would be true, except that later that day (or perhaps the next day) a redaction was submitted, saying he was misunderstood. What he really said was "quite smooth" [businessinsider.com].
The Key (Score:2, Informative)
The key word here is SHIPPED, not sold.
All "tablets" reported from AAPL's quarterly were SOLD, not merely shipped and waiting to be bought.
Whatevers though, small point, and many Android tablets will be sold but the fragmentation will not abate.