@trickytom2 According to: ComScore, U.S. smartphone market share numbers for March through May 2010, Android phone saw the most significant growth in market share in May, up 4.0 percentage points to capture 13.0 percent of smartphone subscribers.

Despite Android?s gain, RIM and Apple still dominate, with RIM taking 41.7 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.4 percent share.

Microsoft saw a 13.2 percent share and Palm rounded the top five out with a 4.8 percent share.

Now, the world picture is somewhat different, but as has been the trend for a long time now, the U.S. leads the world in most important tech advances. I discount the faster broadband speeds and other trends in some cities in some far eastern countries, because they are actually anomalies and not relevant to this discussion.

So we can look to the U.S. for guidance on future trends in the industrialised world.

You say: "It's a matter of common-sense. iOS4 and Android aren't vastly different in performance. When $300 Android tablets start hitting the market, what do you think will happen to iPad sales?"

I don't know what your business is or how familiar you are with the actual prevalence of common sense, but where I live and work, it's nowhere near as common as its name suggests. Besides, your evoking of common sense here is flawed.

Android's gain in market share during the period for March through May 2010 represents [IN TRUTH] a 1.9% gain over Microsoft and only a 1% gain over Apple - at a time when Apple was nearing the end of the iPhone 3Gs product cycle and before the launch of the iPhone 4 - which as we now know sold 1.7 million on the first day, and more than 3 million in the first 21 days.

What do you think that's going to do to the numbers next time around?

Then you give us: "Another thing to factor in is performace. [sic] The current iPad only has 256Mb of RAM, and that may not be enough for ios4, which means that all of those folks who bought v.1 are **** out of luck."

You aren't paying attention are you? Apple's business model is, in part, based on releasing products that are just powerful enough to satisfy early adapters, and drive significant sales. Therefore, come April 2011 there will be a new iPad model with more power.

So what do you think THIS will do to Apple's iPad sales? Yep, it all starts over again. The new numbers are anyone's guess.

And what do you think THIS will do to all the other potential tablet maker's sales?

You also say: "Android phones have already taken a large percentage of market away from the iPhone. Now, factor in the fact that there will likely also be Win7 and Palm players, and you quickly see that the iPad isn't going to stay on top for very long."

Again you're misusing a common term. This time: 'fact'. Nothing is certain about those releases. They haven't gained significant ground from Apple. They've gained some, at a time as described above. They've gained most from the other players.

Win 7 is already in trouble. Microsoft's schizoid behaviour, and their disaster with Project Pink/Kin [including that criminally dangerous ad campaign] shows they're not thinking right yet - if they ever will. Again, their making public that development phone is clear proof of this.

Anyway, when do you really expect these products to appear? And what impact do you really expect products that have been leaked and announced and shelved, leaked and announced again to actually have? I see nothing but muddle in this game.

The desire users have for Apple products may, on the face of it, transcend reason. It doesn't, it's a simple thing to track if you know how. And that doesn't mean it can be dismissed in the casual manner you have here.

The total lack of any coherent marketing either from Android, and the confusing array of choices from all the different manufacturers IS a major issue for the Android collective. I see it peaking in the not too distant future and not gaining much more ground. Most of all, it won't gain much if any more ground from Apple. The big losers from now on will be those players that haven't got their act together yet and those that have already had their day. Expect RIM to decline steadily, partially because they're employing backward thinking and never have gained scale globally.

I used to be a huge fan of Palm, but as part of the HP stable I have little or no hopes for their future offerings.

Before the full reality of the disparate ambitions that make up the Android experiment, I was also a fan of Android, but as we've seen, in practice, it simply doesn't work.

Even when Google kicked things off with a host of other device manufacturers [instead of backing, and concentrating all their resources on one], I was still fairly optimistic. Then they announced they were releasing a phone of their own - in competition with their partners!! I was actually quite worried for Apple at this point, because even though the move was commercially very bad practice and likely to upset all the other manufacturers, the prospect of a Google branded Phone [the GPhone?] was a potential marketing godsend. But then they chose to let a techie with a huge ego name it the Nexus fu ** ing One, and instantly killed the thing dead from an average buyer's point of view. And you do realise that it's average buyers that drive the market, right? And a vast proportion of them are women.

I predicted [on here and other places] it would be a disaster and it was. Just a few days ago, Google had to drop their attempts to sell the horribly named Nexus one on line. And this is hugely significant from a business analyst's point of view. If you can't sell your own phone to a dedicated audience that uses your Globally ubiquitous search facility billions of times a day, online - where you've got dirt low overhead [you even own the servers!] and 100% control of the message... you've got something [or several things], horribly horribly wrong, and much more than just the name. And this is what you're pinning your hopes on?

Good luck. $1000 says you're wrong.