Market researchers: Apple to dominate media tablet market until 2015

Gartner's predicted tablet sales from 2010 till 2015 in thousands of units.
Source: Gartner Market researchers Gartner have forecast the development of the media tablet market until 2015. According to their analyses, Apple's iPad and iOS operating system will fall to a market share of less than half (47%) in 2015, but it will still remain ahead of Android at about 39% share. The study predicts that the Blackberry tablet and its QNX operating system will be in third place, the only other tablet device to reach a double-digit market share. For the current year (2011), Gartner has predicted that the iPad will dominate the market with a share of almost 68%, while Android is estimated to reach a share of almost 20%. Google's decision to retain more control over Android's tablet version than over its smartphone version is expected to cap Android's market share and slow down price decline, but it is also expected to prevent fragmentation.

For 2015, Gartner predicts precious little chance for MeeGo (1%), HP's WebOS (3%) and other systems (0.2%). The researchers didn't include any Windows media tablets in their forecast, and they don't anticipate any Microsoft tablets being released by 2015, be they tablets running a slimmed-down version of Windows or upscaled Windows Phone 7-based tablets. Gartner estimates that the total market will comprise 70 million tablets this year (2011), 108 million in 2012, and almost 300 million in 2015.

(djwm)