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iPad Will Lead a Growing Market Till 2015, Gartner Says

The growing tablet market will be dominated by Apple's iPad through 2015, according to Gartner. To challenge Apple's iPad, competitors such as Google Android-powered devices will need an ecosystem to rival the 65,000 iPad programs in Apple's App Store. Gartner also said tablets using MeeGo and Hewlett-Packard's webOS will be a minority.

More than two-thirds of tablet  computers sold this year will be iPads, continuing Apple's lock on the burgeoning market, though that share will shrink to 47 percent by 2015. That's the prediction of industry research firm Gartner.
In a report released Monday, Gartner said the computer giant reinvented the tablet market with the iPad  in much the same way it changed the smartphone  market in 2007 with the iPhone.

The Ecosystem Matters

The Stamford, Conn.-based company said the iPad's dominance won't change unless and until competitors develop a better ecosystem for their products. So far, they have focused on hardware development.

Apple has about 65,000 programs designed for the iPad available in its App Store, while Google's Android Market has about 100 for tablets using its operating system, such as the Motorola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab, sales of which have reportedly been underwhelming.

Gartner predicts that Android, the only operating system that is presently a serious treat to the dominance of Apple's iOS for iPad, will grow steadily from 14.2 percent in 2010 to 19.9 percent this year to 24.4 percent in 2012 and 36 percent in 2015.

Tablets running the Linux-based open-source MeeGo operating system will be non-players, Gartner said, going from 0.6 percent last year to one percent in 2015. The webOS system acquired by Hewlett-Packard when it took over Palm will rise slightly from zero to three percent in 2015, according to the analysis.

The QNX system used by Research In Motion for its BlackBerry PlayBook could be a bigger player, with 10 percent of the market in 2015, almost doubling from 5.6 percent this year, Gartner said.

The slow growth of Android for tablets contrasts with its meteoric rise on smartphones via multiple devices on all major U.S. wireless carriers. Last month, comScore found that Android had a slight lead over RIM's BlackBerry as the top platform in the U.S., with 31.2 percent of the market, compared to 30.4 percent for RIM, with iOS trailing at 24.7 percent.

Google recently released Android 3.0 Honeycomb optimized for tablets via the Xoom, but it hasn't been opened to other companies.

Carolina Milanesi, Gartner's vice president for consumer technologies and markets, sees user interface and experience as essential for tablets more than smartphones because call quality and reception don't really factor into the equation.

All About the Apps

"Consumers are more likely than not using them as backup phones, not as main phones," Milanesi told us. "At the end of the day, who wants to carry around a 10-inch screen device  to make a call?" A strong arsenal of applications, she said, "is not just about games but also about content such as books and magazines and productivity  tools. [They] are the key component of what you do with a tablet."

While gaining more apps is a priority for Google, it will have to stoke more interest in developers to wrest them away from iOS.

"It is early days for Honeycomb, but I would not underestimate the interest that developers will have in the second-largest OS in this market," said Milanesi. "You need to look at the smartphone side of things to see how quickly the apps count has gone up in the store. There is more work that Google needs to do as far as tools, creation and advertising, but I think it is becoming clear that they are prepared to do more than what they have done so far."

Wireless Business Solution Zee Tawasha