planning to bring its flagship Android tablet to the market in the next six
months to rival Apple’s iPad.
“In
the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality,” Google
Chairman Eric Schmidt told an Italian newspaper.
Apple is
leading the worldwide media tablet shipments in Q3 2011. The company shipped
11.1 million units in Q3 2011, up from 9.3 million units in Q2 2011. Apple’s
tablet market share reduced to 61.5 percent in Q3 from 63.3 percent in Q2 2011.
Apple’s larger portfolio of tablet-specific apps, upcoming
iPad versions, and growing physical store presence in key emerging markets like
Asia/Pacific will help maintain its global leadership. However, an improving
Android OS experience and lower competitor pricing in an environment with
worldwide economic concerns should help Android to increase its market share.
HP TouchPad shipped 903,354 units to grab a 5 percent share
of the worldwide market, number three behind Samsung’s 5.6 percent market
share.
Though Google had a hand in the development of the Motorola
Xoom, but like other Android tablets, it suffered disappointing sales in a
market dominated by the iPad.
Since then
Google has itself become a major hardware manufacturer via its $12.5 billion
dollars acquisition Motorola’s devices division.
Schmidt
paid tribute to Steve Jobs’ role in kickstarting the tablet market, describing
the iPad as amazing, according to a media
report.
“Steve
Jobs was the Michelangelo of our time. A friend of mine and a unique character,
able to combine creativity and visionary genius with an extraordinary
engineering ability. Steve realized the revolutionary potential of the tablet
and created an amazing product like the iPad,” the paper quoted him, as
saying.
Schmidt
said that competition between Android smartphones and the iPhone will be brutal.
In the
smartphone market, Google designs the Nexus range as both a testing ground for
new versions of Android and to show off cutting-edge hardware. Samsung
manufactures the most recent device, the Galaxy Nexus.
Recently,
IDC announced that after ceding share to 32.4 percent in
Q3 2011 from 33.2 percent in the previous quarter, Android will make
significant share gains tablet OS market in Q4 2011 growing to 40.3 percent.
The share increase comes at the expense of Blackberry which
is slipping from 1.1 percent to 0.7 percent, iOS which is slipping from 61.5
percent to 59.0 percent, and webOS slipping from 5 percent to 0 percent.
According to IDC, worldwide media tablet shipments into
sales channels grew 23.9 percent on a sequential basis in Q3 2011 to 18.1
million units, representing an increase of 264.5 percent from the same quarter
last year.
By Baburajan
K
editor@telecomlead.com
