How Many Tablets On the Market Today? North of 100 (Charts)

By Eric Lai | February 12, 2011, 12:17am PST

Summary: A new survey of the tablet marketscape released on the eve of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona discovered some very interesting statistics (charts!).

Management consultancy PRTM - imagine a boutique version of McKinsey or Boston Consulting - shared some very interesting findings about the tablet marketscape with me on the eve of the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

1) There were 102 tablets already released or in production from 64 vendors as of the end of January.

The majority of them are the result of the phenomenal success of the iPad, which was released last April, just 10 months ago.

Today, the true total is 110 or more, due to the tablets announced and leaked in the last two weeks before MWC. They include:

the 10-inch, dual-core HP TouchPad,

the Wintel-based ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro,

the Dell Windows 7 Business Tablet as well as the Dell Latitude XT3 convertible laptop/tablet,

a forthcoming Android tablet from INQ,

and the Galaxy Tab 2 from Samsung that would be the first to use the tablet-oriented Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.

Why has the tablet market grown so fast? Besides consumer demand, Huw Andrews, a director in PRTM’s technology group, chalks it up to these reasons:

a) Small aggressive companies quickly adapted existing smartphone components for the larger form factor. Think of the Shanzhai knockoffs (APad!) or the $99 models you can find in your local drugstore. In fact, less than a third of the tablets available for sale by the end of 2010 were from large global brands like Apple or Samsung, said Andrews.

b) PC makers had no choice, as tablets cannibalized low-end laptops and netbooks. “If you’re Dell or Lenovo, you kinda got to jump on,” he said.

c) Tablets offer a “beachhead where tablet makers can attack both the mobile phone and laptop fronts.”

2) Hard quantitative proof that ARM is kicking Intel’s butt (click graphic to enlarge).

ARM’s dominance is even more skewed if you consider that the iPad, which uses an ARM processor, made up about 90% of the total tablet market in 2010.

It’s so striking because it wouldn’t seem like a fair fight. Intel is a $44 billion-a-year company with 83,500 employees, while ARM is a $500 million-a-year, 1,900-employee firm.

On the other hand, ARM has an ecosystem of hundreds of chipmakers who collectively sell more than 5 billion ARM chips a year.

“It’s a David versus Goliath battle, I just can’t figure out who is who,” said Andrews.

3) Two form factors are proving the most popular, following the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab’s lead:

4) By number of models, Google Android is also nearly twice as popular than Windows.

Android is used in 55% of tablets available today, according to PRTM, while Windows XP or 7 is used by 29%. iOS is used on just 1% of models. But as noted above, that sole model holds almost 90% of the market, by shipments.

Andrews also had four notable predictions, were an outgrowth of PRTM’s tablet market research:

1) Tablet market growth will outpace the PC and even smartphone markets by a huge margin.

Based on forecasts such as the global tablet market amounting to 200 million units sold in 2014, PRTM’s Andrews predicts that the tablet market should grow four times faster than the smartphone one and 5 times faster than the PC market over the next 4 years.

2) Tablet manufacturers that aren’t already aligned to an OS like the way Apple, Nokia, HP and RIM are, will continue to offer tablets running multiple platforms. In other words, the Samsungs, LGs, Lenovos and Dells of this world will be making both Android and Windows-based tablets, in order to serve different customer segments.

3) Consumers will buy most tablets for the next several years.

4) The tablet market will splinter. Within two years, there will be a few premium models such as the iPad that offer customized user interfaces or apps as differentiators. But the bulk of the market will be low-cost commodity tablets that are nearly indistinguishable.

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Eric Lai tracks the latest news and trends in enterprise mobility.

Biography

Eric Lai

Eric Lai tracks the latest news and trends in enterprise mobility. A veteran tech journalist most recently covering enterprise software for Computerworld, Eric joined Sybase, an SAP company in April 2010. Eric's views are his alone and do not necessarily represent those of SAP. This blog is sponsored by SAP.
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007baf 12th Feb 2011
I had a chance to play with a pre-production PlayBook. It was pretty sleek. The BB guy apologized because it didn't have a dual-core processor and video was jittery. I must say the size and form was pretty nice. Would I trade my iPad for it? No. But it hopefully brings competition and improvement overall in the market place for these devices.
beautiful post, torwhore! wink

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version of the x86 architecture is proprietary and manufactured by an increasingly smaller number of factories every year.

this availability makes up for the lack of user configurable operating systems in use by the ARM manufacturers over the flexibility of the x86 providers' product.

in the end, the mobile computing space is more about inexpensive and capable out-of-box experiences than highly modifyable hardware.

where Apple falls short is not allowing the user to manage their own files without the external intervention of costly systems.

the jury is still out on whether or not Android is the best of the embeded Linux operating systems to use.
but right now it seems to be the best first impression experience.

the more the merrier.
it can only get better.
the best is yet to come.
yada, yada, yada!

just got a 10" Apad to play with.
we'll see if it replaces anything more than my ancient Sony Vaio laptop.
not likely, but we'll see.

happy
.
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Sybase

Blogger Biography

Eric Lai tracks the latest news and trends in enterprise mobility. A veteran tech journalist most recently covering enterprise software for Computerworld, Eric joined Sybase, an SAP company in April 2010. Eric's views are his alone and do not necessarily represent those of SAP.

This blog is sponsored by SAP.

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