iPad Tablet Market Share Down to 54%

Apparently Amazon has managed to find a way to compete with Apple. The iPad, long the only player in the tablet wars, has seen its marketshare fall to 54%. That’s not a tiny sliver of the market by any stretch, but it should worry Apple.

The iPad’s decline is even more precipitous than that of the iPhone, which has recently been replaced by Android devices as the dominant smartphone operating system. what’s interesting is that the market share decline immediately followed the launch of the Kindle Fire.

The analytics firm IDC, one of the most respected in the industry, released its tracking numbers on tablet shipments for the last quarter of 2011. Apple remains the top player in the space, with 54.7%, but that is a 61.5% decline from the previous quarter. IDC claims this shift is thanks to the Kindle Fire, which managed to capture 16.8% of the market. That single-handedly managed to boost Android’s tablet marketshare from 32.3% to 44.6%.

Of course, these numbers might have declined as people chose to hold off on iPad purchases to wait for the new iPad, which is set to be yet another insanely popular Apple product. Apple is also cutting down on the price of the iPad 2 by $100, so that should help sales, also.

But IDC still expects Android to overtake the iPad by 2015 simply because of "the sheer number of vendors" shipping low-priced devices like the Kindle Fire.

Shipments of epaper devices were also up, likely accounted for by the $79.99 price of the new Kindle. These numbers should only grow larger as Amazon and others enter into new markets that previously couldn’t afford the devices.

The Verge Photo by : IDC