Apple’s iPad will continue to dominate the tablet market through to 2015, despite increasing competition from the Android-based community and new market entrants such as RIM. According to new figures from Gartner, Apple iOS tablets will account for 47 percent of the media tablet market in 2015, down from 69 percent this year. Meanwhile, Android-based tablets are forecast to increase their worldwide share of the market from 20 percent in 2011 to 39 percent in 2015. Analysts said Google’s decision not to open up Honeycomb, its first OS version dedicated to tablets, to third parties will prevent fragmentation, but it will also slow the price decline and ultimately cap market share. “The new licensing model Google has introduced with Honeycomb enables Google to drive more control, allowing only optimal tablet implementations that don’t compromise quality of experience,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. “This might mean that prices will drop at a slower pace than what we have seen in the smartphone market.”

 

2010

2011

2012

2015

iOS

83.9

68.7

63.5

47.1

Android

14.2

19.9

24.4

38.6

QNX

0

5.6

6.6

10

WebOS

0

4

3.9

3

MeeGo

0.6

1.1

1.2

1

Other

1.3

0.6

0.5

0.2

Global media tablets OS market share 2010-2015
Source: Gartner (April 2011)

Meanwhile, Gartner praised RIM’s new QNX tablet platform (which powers the vendor’s new BlackBerry PlayBook), which it said “delivers on performance, graphics and multitasking features” – but it questioned the richness of the PlayBook ecosystem. “It will take time and significant effort for RIM to attract developers and deliver a compelling ecosystem of applications and services around QNX to position it as a viable alternative to Apple or Android,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “It will be mainly organisations that will be interested in RIM’s tablets because they either already have RIM’s infrastructure deployed or have stringent security requirements.” Gartner analysts added that platforms such as MeeGo and WebOS, which currently have a weak presence in the smartphone market, will have a limited appeal unless they can grow that business.