Apple’s iPad commanded 85 percent of the market for media tablets in 2010, according to full-year figures reported by ABI Research. The tablet market surged in the second half of the year, but it wasn’t just tablets: device categories including netbooks and mobile broadband-enabled eBook Readers showed gains in year-over-year shipment numbers in 2010. The hype that media tablets were displacing portable computers and dedicated CE device purchases simply didn’t become a reality.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ranked a distant second to the iPad in market share, with about 8 percent, while Archos’s Internet Tablet range just barely moved the needle at 2 percent. These top three vendors accounted for 95 percent of the media tablet market between them. However many new entrants are looking to differentiate themselves from the $600+ ASP of the iPad, so low-feature and low-cost designs will become common. ABI Research expects between 40 and 50 million media tablets to ship worldwide in 2011.