Needless to say, the iPad is utterly dominating the still nascent tablet market… but the extent of its domination might surprise you: according to New York based ABI Research, Apple controls eighty-five percent of the tablet market.
It gets worse… for the competition, that is. The next most dominant tablet maker is Samsung, yet they control only 8% of the market. Finally, Archos — European maker of many puffed up PMPs posing as bargain-basement craplets — controls a distant two percent.
The rest of the competition controls market share too small to count. At the end of the day, Apple and three competitors control 95% of the tablet market between them.
That won’t last, though. There are a lot more frickin’ tablets on their way this year.
“Many new entrants are looking to differentiate themselves from the $600+ ASP of the iPad, so low-feature and low-cost designs will become common,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. “We expect between 40 and 50 million media tablets to ship worldwide in 2011.”
Let’s hope at least one of these tablets is actually competitive with the iPad 2. We don’t want Apple to get complacent designing the iPad 3, do we?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
2 responses to “85% Of All Tablets Are iPads”
Archos tablets have always been far better than anything Apple. And Archos global tablet market share Q1 2011 is likely closer to 6% if Apple still has 85%, just basing that on the January-March earnings and sales numbers officially announced by both companies.
There, are you ready to leave your cult?
You want me to list you how Archos is better than Apple?
Thinner, lighter, has webcam (vs ipad1), supports all video codecs up to 720p, has a real HDMI, a real USB host, a real built-in kick-stand, stereo front facing speakers, is recognized as USB storage on any Windows/Mac/Linux instead of forced to use crap-itunes style software for files transfers, can format internal and external memory using FAT32 or EXT3 if you care to store 4GB+ MKV 720p movies on it, can easily stream Samba/Upnp videos and music up to 720p, the 7″ model fits nicely in 99% of jacket pockets (perfect for bringing with you everywhere), can officially install official “jailbreak” firmware which allows you to play with alternative Android/Angrstom/Ubuntu and other embedded Linux OS, it costs $250 MSRP (cheaper at cheapest retail/online stores), supports MicroSD storage expansion, the 7″ has even a 250GB hard drive version for $50 MSRP more and few mm thicker thickness, oh and it uses a real cool OS called Android which lets you pirate 200’000 apps for free on BitTorrent just transfer any .apk to it for free no jailbreaking needed. Google Marketplace has over 150’000 apps that work great on tablets as since Android 1.6 SDK all Android apps are designed to scale perfectly to tablet size (medium density) unlike iPhone apps on iPad.