Apple’s iPad may be the gold standard towards which all other tablets are compared but even it isn’t immune to the changing market forces. Last year, Apple faced some rather stiff competition from Amazon who came out with their Kindle Fire.
The Kindle Fire has done wonders for the Android operating system, ensuring that this OS maintains and/or grows its share of the market. Recently, Strategy Analytics performed a series of computations to gauge the impact that the Kindle Fire has had on the iPad. Although Strategy Analytics didn’t offer up a model by model break down, it’s well known that the Kindle Fire has been the tablet that can be credited with much of the success of Amazon’s tablet line up. In fact, year over year, Amazon’s tablet shipments have jumped by a factor of three and are now approximately 10.5 million devices. Apple on the other hand shipped 15.4 million devices. Comparing the two, we see that Apple accounted for nearly 58% of the market whereas Android had 39.1% of the market.
The other company that we would expect to be a big player in this market would be Microsoft and with just 400,000 Windows tablets shipped in fall 2011, Windows accounted for under 2% of the market. Microsoft really hasn’t been able to make any gains in this market for nearly 8 years, but the company is hoping that the launch of Windows 8 this year will help to change the tides of its fortunes.
