A new comparative study shows that Apple’s iPad is slipping in the global market share for tablets after search giant Google started offering its Android mobile operating system to tablet computers in 2010.
According to ABI Research, 96 percent of tablet shipments in the second quarter of last year were Apple iPads, a time when Android posed as a serious threat in the smartphone industry but still on the works to add support for tablet computers.
A year after, Apple iPad shipments dropped to 75 percent while Android tablets grabbed 20 percent of the tablet market worldwide, the research firm says.
To wrap up the entire market, the remaining 5 percent share mostly came from WebOS- and BlackBerry OS-powered tablets.
ABI Research projects that annual shipments of tablet computers will reach the 120 million mark by 2015.
Jeff Orr, ABI Research mobile devices group director, said that despite HTML5 gaining support from tech companies to build mobile app-like websites on different mobile OSes, HTML5-based apps are not as dedicated as apps designed to run on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.
Photo by Pjpearce [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
