Is It a "Tablet" Market or an "iPad" Market?

Strategy Analytics says last-quarter tablet shipments (quarter ending June 2011) topped 15.1 million units, a material increase over the 3.5 million units from the year-ago period. Apple remained in the number-one slot with 9.25 million iPads sold, representing a 61 percent share of the tablet market overall.

At the same time, Android tablets have gone from 2.9 percent market share in June 2010 to 30.1 percent in June 2011, a 27 percentage point increase based on sales of 4.55 million units. In the year-ago quarter Apple enjoyed a 94 percent share. The issue, over the longer term, is whether the relevant market is "tablets" or "iPads." It isn't a rhetorical question. The "MP3 market" is not nearly as accurate description of the portable music player market as "the iPod market," some would argue.

What every other supplier than Apple has to worry about is some similar development in the tablet market. Things will change, but at the moment some observers would ask why a user should buy an Android device instead of an iPad. "Because it costs less" would be a reasonable answer, but is not generally the case today. Likewise, application richness currently favors iPad, not the Android ecosystem.

Android tablets grab 30 percent of the market, but iPad still doubles that