Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

sfcrazy writes "Linux is on a roll. After conquering the smartphone space, Android is now dominating the tablet space. According to a new study by Gartner, 'the tablet growth in 2013 was fueled by the low-end smaller screen tablet market, and first time buyers; this led Android to become the No. 1 tablet operating system (OS), with 62 percent of the market.'" Also, everyone is buying tablets.(~200 million sold in 2013 vs ~115 million in 2012). Microsoft still only has 2% of the tablet market.

Comments

The year of the Linux Tablet

[Niterios]

It is finally here! Now we just need it to be an open platform.

Re:The year of the Linux Tablet

[Stormwatch]

What kind of moron would do music production or video on a tablet?

Re:The year of the Linux Tablet

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Bias" is the name of one of my indispensable music performance and recording applications. :-)

From Positive Grid.

Re:ANDROID != LINUX

[farble1670]

~/src (develop) $ adb shell
root@android:/ # uname -a /system/bin/sh: uname: not found
127|root@android:/ #

But where are all the Androids?

[pubwvj]

Despite this claim to large number shipped I just am not seeing Android tablets out in the hands of users. I've seen a couple (count them, two) Kindles in the real world.

Meanwhile I've seen many hundreds of Apple's iPad's and thousands of iPhones, iPodTouches, etc.

Something's not right with the statistics given in the article. It just doesn't match the real world. So is this a Shipped vs Sales confusion?

Or maybe the Androids are being hidden away in 'smart' devices like toasters and washing machines. That would certainly inflate the Android numbers.

Well, it doesn't really matter. Our family has six iPodTouches, an iPad and five MacBooks. How many Androids are being claimed to be sold is completely irrelevant. What matters is we can do the things we want to do from content creation to communications to consumption with the devices we have.

Re:But where are all the Androids?

[Solandri]

Despite this claim to large number shipped I just am not seeing Android tablets out in the hands of users. I've seen a couple (count them, two) Kindles in the real world.

Meanwhile I've seen many hundreds of Apple's iPad's and thousands of iPhones, iPodTouches, etc.

Something's not right with the statistics given in the article. It just doesn't match the real world. So is this a Shipped vs Sales confusion?

These are annual sales figures. That is, they're not the number of tablets in use, they're the first derivative of the number of tablets in use. People don't buy a new tablet every year - they keep it around for a few years. So the tablets you'll see in use are a weighted culmination of 2011, 2012, and 2013 sales, which if I remember were about 85% iPad, 60% iPad, and now 36% iPad

Despite what the Apple apologists have posted above, the important thing is the trend. And it's pretty clear that the trend is down for Apple (in market share - growth in the market means their unit sales are still increasing, just nowhere near as quickly as Android's unit sales are). They will need to come out with better products with better features (or lower prices) and more options (the iPad Mini was a good step) if they want to regain the market lead or even hang on to their current market share. Of course Apple being Apple, they might not care about that. They may be content having just 5% of the market if it's a very lucrative 5%.

And about 2/3rds of phones I see in use are Android, about 2/3rds of the tablets are iPads, and the last time I saw an iPod Touch was in a drawer gathering dust.

Re:But where are all the Androids?

[Wild_dog!]

I see lots of tablets at elementary schools.
Seems like all the kids have them now since they got them as stocking stuffers.
My kids keep asking why they can't get tablets and take them to school.
Seems they are the only ones without devices at recess.
hahahaha