The Apple iPad's 2010 market share was 85 percent, according to ABI. Following in the far distance, the No. 2 spot went to Samsung, while Archos came in third.
The Apple iPad accounted for 85 percent of
worldwide media tablet sales in 2010, ABI Research reported April 20.
While the research firm expects the demand for tablets to possibly level
off toward 2015 or 2016, sales are expected to remain strong for the
next several years as more and more of these mobile devices flood the
market.
"We expect
between 40 and 50 million media tablets to ship worldwide in 2011," ABI
Senior Practice Director Jeff Orr said in a statement.
While Apple controls the lion's share of the market-a position it is expected to maintain
at least through 2015,
according to Gartner-second position, albeit a distant one, went to
Samsung, which secured 8 percent of the globe's tablet market share in
2010, according to the report. Archos, accounting for 2 percent of
the market, earned the still-more-distant third-place prize.
With
Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, Research In Motion, Motorola, HTC and
others all joining the tablet market fray, that breakdown is far from
carved in stone, said Orr.
"Many
new entrants are looking to differentiate themselves from the $600+
[average selling price] of the iPad, so low-feature and low-cost designs
will become common," he continued.
To
point, Archos, a brand with hardly the cachet of some of its
smartphone-making competitors, managed to get itself onto the podium
with Apple by appealing to the tightening of purse strings. In September 2010, it
introduced five Android-running tablets priced from $99 to $349. The
tablets, with screen sizes from 2.8 to 10.1 inches, offer Web browsing,
online gaming, HD video, access to ebooks, social networks and
applications, and 1GHz processors.
Apple
has proved, however, that a good number of consumers and enterprise IT
buyers have no trouble with the iPad's price point.
When reporting its fiscal 2011 second-quarter earnings April 20,
the company announced that it sold 4.7 million iPads during the
quarter, which ended March 26 and so included the release of the iPad 2.
During a call with media and analysts, Apple Chief Financial Officer
Peter Oppenheimer noted, "We sold every iPad 2 that we could make during
the quarter."
The surge in sales during the second half of 2010, Orr noted, wasn't only for tablets.
"Device
categories including netbooks and mobile broadband-enabled ebook
readers showed gains in year-over-year shipment numbers in 2010," Orr
explained. "The hype that media tablets were displacing portable
computers and dedicated CE device purchases simply didn't become a
reality."
While
tablets aren't exactly replacing PCs, they're nonetheless affecting
their sales. In March, analysts at Gartner lowered their PC shipment
projections for 2011 and 2012. The firm now expects shipments this year
to grow by 10.5 percent, instead of 15.9 percent, and 2012's shipments
to grow by 13.6 percent instead of 14.8 percent.
"We once thought that mobile PC growth would continue to be sustained by consumers buying second and third
mobile PCs as personal devices," Gartner Research Director George Shiffler said on
March 3. "However, we now believe that consumers are not only likely to
forgo additional mobile PC buys but are also likely to extend the
lifetimes of the mobile PCs they retain as they adopt media tablets and
other mobile PC alternatives as their primary mobile device."
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