As featured on The Wall blog.
In 2010, Steve Jobs went on stage at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to unveil what Apple hoped to be a revolutionary product that would disrupt the computing world. The shift was not as dramatic as planned.
Up until the iPad's release the tablet market had consisted of niche products outside of the mass market. Needless to say, following the introduction of the iPad the competition in the tablet market increased further with manufacturers such as Samsung, Amazon, Google, Sony and Tesco creating their own devices.
To gain a better understanding of where the tablet market stands today, without the overpowering ‘noise' that Apple creates, 51Degrees – a device detection company - has pulled together data from more than 3 billion unique web sessions per month based on a variety of Android tablets, and their percentage of web traffic, on a global and individual country scale (Germany, UK, USA and India.)
The results showed that outside of Apple, Samsung's Galaxy brand maintained 55% of all global web traffic on tablet devices. It could be argued that this success kicked off with the first Galaxy Note in late 2011, with recorded sales of over 10 million units.
Samsung came out on top in all four of the individual countries measured, Germany 64%, UK 46%, USA 43%, and India 36%.This may be due to Samsung's ability to reinvent their tablets, regularly bringing to market new devices, which enables them to comfortably compete with Apple and in fact lead the non-iOS market. For example the range includes releases at various sizes from the 7-inch display of the Galaxy Tab 7.0” through 7.7” and 8.9” to 10.1”.
51Degrees found that globally all but one of the remaining tablet device manufacturers recorded struggled to reach web traffic higher than 10%. The data perhaps proves that Amazon is the only other tablet manufacturer with any real global market significance (10%).
Jay Yarow at Business Insider argues that Amazon is the second biggest Android tablet success story and they should be congratulated on their success due to the fact that smartphones and tablets are not their forte. Amazon's popularity in the USA created an impressive web traffic percentage of 23%.
Outside of Samsung and Amazon, the tablet market looks to be a challenging space. 51Degrees data shows that even country local manufacturers such as Barnes and Noble (USA), Medion (Germany), iBall (India) and Tesco (UK) are lucky to tip 5% of web traffic. With Apple and Samsung so far ahead of the rest of the current market there is little room for others to challenge.