The Apple iPad isn’t that unbeatable anymore, since it’s bleeding market share like there’s no tomorrow. It appears that now Android owns 39% of the slate market, with the impressive push of the Amazon Kindle Fire contributing to this effort.
We reviewed the $200 tablet here and found it to be a pretty decent slate, although its focus on Amazon services might bother the user looking for the usual Android experience. However, we’ve already seen Android 4.0 ported to this device and a stable version is on the way (or pretty close already). Back to the Kindle Fire boosting Android slates, Strategy Analytics has some figures to go with that theory, saying that Android tablets got 39% of the market in Q4 2011.
That’s an impressive increase over the 29% in the same quarter in 2010. Apple now leads the pack with 57.6%, still a pretty decent lead, especially with the iPad 3 coming this year. The iPad market share was 68.2% in 2010 and meanwhile Microsoft is barely part of the statistics with 1.5% of the tablet market. The good thing about the Strategy Analytics figures is that they are based on sales and not shipments.
