Android Lost Tablet Share Amid iPad 2 Growth, PlayBook Entry, IDC Says

IDC raised its forecast for worldwide e-reader and tablet sales for second half 2011 after Q2 performance passed expectations by 9 million units. Worldwide media tablet shipments rose by 88.9 percent sequentially in Q2 and 303.8 percent year over year, to 13.6 million units, IDC said. For the year, IDC now expects 62.5 million units to ship, up from a previous forecast of 53.5 million units, it said.

Not all tablet makers are reaping rewards, IDC said. Apple’s continued domination and Research in Motion’s arrival with the Blackberry PlayBook in the quarter took a toll on Android tablets’ market share, IDC said. Android-based media tablets saw combined share in Q2 drop to 26.8 percent from 34 percent, it said. RIM ended Q2 with 4.9 percent share and iPad 2 with 68.3 percent, with 9.3 million iPad 2s shipping in Q2, IDC said.

In addition to “robust demand for iPad 2, IDC expects consumers who were on the fence about buying a tablet to “scoop up $99 TouchPads” as HP seeks to sell off inventory of the moribund tablet. IDC expects close to a million TouchPads to ship before the end of the year, leading WebOS’s worldwide market share to hit a short-lived 4.7 percent in Q3. With HP having “no clear plan to license or sell the OS to other vendors,” WebOS market share is doomed to shrink to zero by Q1 2012, IDC said.

The forecast doesn’t improve for Android tablets during the next quarter, according to IDC, which predicts Android market share will fall to 23 percent before growing share again in Q4, it said. Apple’s iOS share will continue to lead Android by more than 40 percentage points for the remainder of the year, said Jennifer Song, IDC research analyst. The gap is expected to narrow “substantially” by 2015, she said.

E-reader sales experienced a seasonal dip in Q2, slipping 9 percent sequentially to 5.4 million units, IDC said. Year-over-year growth for the young category was 167 percent, it said. Amazon led the market with a 51.7 percent share, followed by Barnes & Noble with 21.2 percent, it said. Citing product refreshes and strong Q2 sales, IDC expects e-reader shipments to grow significantly through the holiday season, reaching 27 million units for the year, up from a previous projection of 16.2 million units, due to increased hardware and content availability, it said.

IDC predicts major e-book vendors will slash current-generation, black-and-white e-readers to sub-$100 by the holidays. It also expects Amazon’s “much-rumored, color LCD-based device” to ship later this year. “Because we expect it to run a customized version of Android that ties its use to Amazon’s content services, we expect the device to more closely resemble Barnes & Noble’s Color Nook than Apple’s iPad 2,” said Tom Mainelli, research director-mobile connected devices. E-readers are gaining traction thanks to increasing functionality, lower prices, and greater availability, IDC said.

IDC defines tablets as x86 or ARM-based devices with color displays larger than five inches and smaller than 14 inches running lightweight operating systems such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS. Tablet PCs, by contrast, run full PC operating systems and are based on x86 processors, IDC said. Media tablets support multiple connectivity technologies and a broad range of applications, which differentiates them from single-purpose devices such as e-readers, it said.