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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.
It is finally here! Now we just need it to be an open platform.
I don't think it is the quality of the apps that drives people not to purchase the Android version - I think it is the nature of the buyer. Most of these Android tablets are low-end... people saving perhaps $50. Cost conscious people are not going to be the best customers for an app store. Yes, I know there are high-end Android devices. I'd wager that people who buy those end up making just as many app purchases as iPad buyers. I'd also wager that the number of high-end Android devices sold is not a terribly significant part of the market, yet probably accounts for all of the profit.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Don't believe.
There is NO Posix userspace on Android.
Posix kernel land is locked/limited.
Why does it take 16 GB RAM to compile the Android tarball? That's some BEAUTIFUL community inclusion!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Who is making all these tablets? Here's the rough breakdown of 2013 unit volume from Gartner for worldwide:
* Apple 36%
* Samsung 19%
* ASUS 6%
* Amazon 5%
* Lenovo 3%
* All others 31%
the first notable thing is that Apple sells more than Samsung, Asus, Amazon, and Lenovo combined. The second notable thing, who is the "all others"? All sort of white-label chinese makers? Who is buying these? And can you say that these are truly Android tablets if they have some sort of modified android 2.3?
Here are the categories that I see in this market:
* iOS
* "Premium" Android. The Galaxy Tabs, the Nexus tablets, etc. Sold in US, EU, etc. The ones we are familiar with
* Kindle
* MS Surface
* white label tablets. Presumably built and sold in China, elsewhere.
We need to recognize that premium android might as well be a different OS than white label android. The apps will be different, the languages will be different, the monetization will be different, the fragmentation will be different. For all intensive purposes premium android is as removed from white label android as it is from kindle.
There is one manufacturer of iOS tablets, there are butt loads of android tablet makers.
That fact alone tips the balance. And like the story says, lots of them are *cheap*, in a market where apple would never tread.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sure, if you go with Gartner's numbers which undercut Apple's reported sales figures (you know, numbers that undergo SEC scrutiny for accuracy) by almost 4 million units while also adding in Android "white box" units that include TV dongles which track as tablets despite being not-at-all tablets while also clouding the results by reporting Apple's sales-to-end-users numbers with Android's shipped-into-channel numbers. So, yeah, if you cut Apple's numbers and artificially inflate Android's numbers, yes, Android is beating iOS in the tablet space.
And now you may mod me troll while claiming I'm just an Apple fanboy for speaking the truth.
I have such fond memories of when this site wasn't such a blatant tool of spin doctors for certain industry interests...
I'd avoid any of these compromise tablets like the surface. I've used them (at work) an they really combine all the disadvantages of a tablet with the disadvantages of a laptop, they're the worst of both worlds.
For example, you can't use the keyboard cover of the surface unless it's on a flat surface. Personally I often use my laptop in bed, which needs a solid keyboard.
The surface has a mix of Metro and desktop UI, I ended up getting frustrated when trying to manipulate the desktop UI I ended up plugging in a mouse.
Some of the control panel items are in Metro, others are Windows Classic.
Microsoft have not shown a good history in updating their consumer devices, for example most Windows Phone 7 devices could not be updated to WP 8.
Android IS an open platform. It's entirely up to you if you want to be locked into Google's ecosystem or not. Install Cyanogenmod or another third-party ROM, then look as there's no GApps or Google all over your phone. But remember it's now up to you to sideload a new app store and get the APKs to what non-Google services you use.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
No idea how they make up sales numbers.
Apple's own sales numbers say they sold 74 million iPads in 2014. Not sure how gartner lost 4 million.
Also, Apple's numbers are reported as sales to users, everyone else uses sales to channel (the channel can return unsold stock to the company in the following quarter but can still claim it sold that many)
... because it's the form factor of a kindle
I'm wondering, if you wanted a 7" tablet, why you didn't buy an iPad mini instead? Seems a bit unfair to criticise the iPad on size, when the mini is available and is pretty much the same size as a Nexus 7. Not to mention a bit cheaper than the full size iPad.
As a counter-datapoint, I took a couple of Nexus 7's home during the Christmas holidays. And the kids didn't like them at all, and instead fought over the one iPad. Now, this might just be because kids are dumb and like the bigger thing just because it's bigger, and also I'm beginning to suspect that they also quite like fighting just for the hell of it. But the Nexus' didn't charge their batteries while in use and plugged in, whereas the iPad did. Pretty annoying.
On both iOS and Android you can use something called Puffin browser. Five minutes using that thing, and you realise why no mobile OS has any interest in supporting Flash. But if you really need Flash, it's there.
It's Adobe that dropped support for Flash on Android.
In the end it's a good thing. It's a massive battery drain and if both iOS and Android don't support it then there"s less use of it for needless purposes.
I don't think it is the quality of the apps that drives people not to purchase the Android version - I think it is the nature of the buyer. Most of these Android tablets are low-end... people saving perhaps $50. Cost conscious people are not going to be the best customers for an app store. Yes, I know there are high-end Android devices. I'd wager that people who buy those end up making just as many app purchases as iPad buyers. I'd also wager that the number of high-end Android devices sold is not a terribly significant part of the market, yet probably accounts for all of the profit.
I recently bought myself my first tablet. Cheap, $150 10.1" screen, 1200x800 resolution. Works great. I didn't buy it for gaming, though I do some gaming on it, I didn't buy it for watching videos, though I probably will sometimes. I bought it for viewing comic books. Which is does very decently.
Will I buy apps? A few, I plan on purchasing, like ComicRack, and maybe an emulator or 2.
This will hold me over till they start making 12"+ tablets with higher resolutions. (yes, I know you can get 1080p tablets at 9" but seriously, I want more screen, not higher resolution in a smaller space.)
Be seeing you...
Gartner has a terrible track record. If you see any article citing Gartner statistics or predictions, you are best served by ignoring and moving along.
http://www.zdnet.com/why-does-...
http://seekingalpha.com/instab...
From Wikipedia:
"OHA [Open Handset Alliance] members are contractually forbidden from producing devices that are based off incompatible forks of Android."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
This has a chilling effect on hiring manufacturers to build your actual device when most of them are already tied to OHA.
This is a perverse definition of "open".
From http://appleinsider.com/articl...
"The most glaring inconsistency is a disconnect between Gartner's 70.4 million iPad sales and Apple's self-reported 74 million unit sales for 2013. From the first quarter — Apple's second fiscal quarter — to the fourth, the company reported iPad sales of 19.5 million, 14.6 million, 14.1 million and 26 million, respectively. The total: 74.2 million iPads sold during 2013. "
Note these numbers are reported by Apple on SEC filings, not on press releases.
And a couple of other suspicious things here. 1) Shipped doesn't mean sold as you say, but it can include give aways like when you buy a Samsung TV and get one of their pads for free. Yeah, if you gave me a Samsung tablet I'd take it. Then I'd give it to a poor relative or kid down the street. Not worth anything to me. Also, the "Other" category out ships all the other Android OEMs including the top 3 Android OEM's combined. Sorry, but its pretty arbitrary to put a crappy knock off for the 3rd world market with a state of the art iPad or equivalent. Finally, Gartner predicted that the iPhone would be a flop in 2007 and again in 2008. Their fantasies about MS products in the mobile market are pretty imaginative too.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
you can add Debian and its ports to Android
quit your whining, you pansy
Our iPad gets probably 30 hours use a week by all of our family. It seems to be useful to each member of the family for different purposes.
Perhaps it is missing key features, but I don't really think we notice because we each have our own way of using it.
And when we need real computing power we just jump on the desktop machine.
We haven't really regretted having an iPad for any reason.
How do you type on an ipad in bed?
Bluetooth keyboard or type on the screen, but the BT keyboard from Apple is a keyboard in a laser cut aluminum case, so it's not nearly as bendy as the surface keyboard.
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.
My two year old iPod Touch is considered obsolete by Apple. I paid full retail for it and it can't run the new iOS. It was one of my biggest mistake purchases recently.
Despite the Metro UI, I like my Surface Pro a lot more than my iPad, and I use it constantly. It doesn't suffer from the walled garden of iOS, and I have a ton of programs installed. Very few Metro apps from the app store, however - I mostly have desktop and command line stuff from sourceforge (plus the obligatory Office suite.) The Microsoft app store is lacking, so I rarely think of it as an iPad type tablet. Instead, I think of it as a very portable laptop. And with the i5 and the SSD, performance hasn't been a problem.
Even though I lug them both around in my backpack, and the Surface is twice as heavy as the iPad, I use the iPad only about once a week these days, and that's only because of some iOS-only apps I need for work. Otherwise, the Surface is my go-to portable platform.
Plus, ever since iOS 7 came out, both platforms are now essentially equally ugly. iOS 7's UI changes are about the best gift Apple could have given Microsoft.
John
Samsung dominates Android tablet sales. ASUS, Amazon, and Lenovo are the next 3 leading brands of Android tablets (combined they are about half the Android tablet space - meaning on-par with Apple in total tablet sales). None of them sell low-end/cheap tablets. It's not price that is driving people to Android tablets - it is their familiarity with Android via their cell phones. Android dominates cell phones; it is only natural that people used to Android on their phone would look to use the same platform for their tablet.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro. Already on sale, 12 inch tablet with 2600x1500? resolution. Not sure on the exact number for the other dimension, but its available now.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Considering the iPod Touch limitations, why would you need iOS7 anyway?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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