Kindle Fire & Nook Now 40% of Android Tablets

Well that was fast. The Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet, two of the newest entrants into the tablet race, have already managed to claim 40% of the Android tablet market.

The devices, which decided to--finally--compete with the iPad on price, have exploded in popularity and proved to be the first other type of tablet that people are actually willing to buy.

While Android tablets are largely talked about as failures, they have slowly been picking up momentum. In Q4 2011, for example, a study--performed by the same man who gives the 40% number for the Fire and Tablet--showed that Android tablets make up 39% of the market. And while that might be a fairly small slice of the pie for the dozens of Android tablet makers to divvy up, it shows that Android tablets do actually have a future. In fact, Peter King, the author of the study, said that Android tablets, excluding the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet for a moment, have seen a 100% growth rate, compared to the iPad’s rate of 110%. Not bad, but clearly lagging behind.

If you throw the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet into the mix, however, the growth rate balloons to 240%, which is more than twice the rate at which the iPad grew. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that the tablets launched hlaf of the way through Q4.

Basically what these numbers show is that Android tablet manufacturers need to stop competing directly with the iPad and focus on what Apple doesn’t know how to do: make budget hardware. Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet are at most half the price of a new iPad. If more manufacturers can build compelling middling machines, we’ll see an explosion of Android tablets.

LAPTOP Photo by : Courtney Boyd Myers