Google's Data Suggests Tablet Usage is Under 1% of Android

[Guest]

There has been an ongoing discussion about the popularity of tablets in general when compared to the iPad.

Google's Data Suggests Tablet Usage is Under 1% of Android : Read more

 

[becherovka]

If i was to buy a tablet I would want it to do more than my phone could do not just have a bigger screen.

 

[becherovka]

Sounds right to me

 

[Jerky_san]

Frankly they never released 3.0 to anyone besides OEM's which was BS. Android is supposed to be "open" yet we never got anything. They claim they will release the next version but I doubt it. I have a GTablet and its pretty good but Tegra 2 would be a lot better with the 3.0 that is on a Zoom. It would be much more nice if they would allow the playback of high profile on h264 but it would seem nvidia left it out of Tegra 2. So now you must convert all anime you can get to ipad type standards..

 

[JOSHSKORN]

Make me tablet that fits exactly inside an 8 1/2"x11" notebook and maybe I'll actually buy one, not one with some small 7" screen. Add phone capabilities to it, as well.

 

[Guest]

Could be people waiting for android tablet makers to remove their heads from their backsides and get some out that are both affordable and work properly with the tablet version of android, not a crippled phone version dumped onto it.

 

[Prince_Porter]

I love my Droid X, but I just can't find a practical use to having a tablet. It is, as many have said, just a large phone. The resolution isn't as good, it isn't nearly as portable, and it's not as refined as smart phones are. I think Google is on the right track with closing some of its side projects and focusing on what's important, hopefully they can prove that tablets is somewhere they really want to be.

 

[lamorpa]

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]Exactly...[/citation]
There is a thumbs up icon in the upper right corner of each post. That's where you make this kind of indication (or should I have just 'thumbs down'ed this comment)

 

[griffed88]

I just haven't been impressed at all with Android based tablets. When testing them out they always lag when opening apps, switching between portrait and landscape mode, or switching pages of apps. To me it just seems sloppy. When testing out the ipad everything worked smoothly and it just felt like a better experience.

I don't own a tablet and probably never will, but I think a big reason for the ipad's success verses android tablets isn't just good marketing. The ipad just has a better user experience imo

 

[MeanSquare]

Laptops have a lot of computing and software power, but they're just too big to carry with you all the time. They also take to long to boot and close to too long to come out of hibernation. Phones are just the right size for being always there and are instant on, but their processing and application power are at a lower level. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Tablets, I think, combine the worst elements of laptops (size, power consumption) and the worst of phones (low-power apps and processors). They have one advantage: They have a larger screen.
Most people do the math and decide they'll either stick with a phone and desktop (or phone and laptop) and skip the tablet for now.
Tablets are decent for e-mail and browsing now. Eventually, the processing and application power will improve beyond the entry level. Until then, Apple fanboys and early adopters will be the mainstay purchasers.

 

[jryan388]

I would hate to see windows running on a 1ghz dual-core ARM processor...

 

[Dark Comet]

Most tablets have a bigger screen allowing you to do more on them, don't know about you but surfing on my phones a pain, but with a tablet its much easier because of the large screen. You also have much better battery life and bigger storage most of the time. So they do offer advantages a phone does not offer.

 

[house70]

I like the way my Asus TF works. It does everything I need a tablet to do and gives me options that other OSes don't. Just saying, to each his/her own.

 

[dconnors]

Is this really a surprise? There are over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and the vast majority of those are going to be Android phones and not tablets. The 1 percent number isn't a bad sign for tablets, since smartphones are cheaper and considered more a necessity.

-Devin Connors

 

[Dandalf]

Of course it's an iPad-only market. The only people stupid enough to buy something that's basically just a huge phone are Apple users. If Apple released a turn in a white box, and it sold millions, would other turds in boxes by other manufacturers sell anything? Of course not. Because normal people don't buy turds.

 

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]When Windows 8 tablets come out next year kiss Android tablets good-bye. What's the point of Android tablets at that point? iPads will always be around because Apple has the best marketing on the planet. Even PlayBooks will probably stick around because of the business community. Now that the PlayBook is the only one approved for government use..that helps too. Android is great on phones...just picked up a Droid 3 and I love it but the market for Android tablets is gone once tablets with Windows 8 start coming out.[/citation]


So a Windows tablet will offer super smooth UI and 10h of battery life under full use and all apps will run great?

I doubt that!!!

The one thing that MS has proved is that they cannot make an efficient and cheap OS.
A successful tablet will be very efficient and very cheap. I bet Windows 8 tablet will be very expensive and when people buy them then they'll find that their favorite applications don't work on the Windows tablet as it runs on a real PC.

iPad is successful because it is well designed to do what it it supposed to do and not to replace the MacBooks.

Also neither PC manufacturers nor MS would like the tablets to eat into the PC sales. Maybe this will happen in 5 years but it won't happen in 2012.

 

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]jryan388[/nom]I would hate to see windows running on a 1ghz dual-core ARM processor...[/citation]

You can see Windows running on Atom, which is faster. It looks like it truly sucks!

 

[gm0n3y]

I think the real reason here is that tablets don't really have a use right now. The type of people that will just buy a device because it is shiny and new are apple users, the rest of us that buy a device because of what we can do on it are just not buying tablets. I'm still saying that the tablet craze is just a fad. There are certainly some niche apps that work great on a tablet, especially in a commercial setting (touch screen computers have been around for 10+ years in retail), but for the most part the general public has no really need for them. Maybe in another 5-10 years when there are actually some really useful apps that I can't just use on my phone then I'll consider getting a tablet.

 

[c0n7ax]

OK I had to finally sign up an account to address some of this silly ignorance. Most of your people claiming there to be no use in tablets besides being Apple fanboys is crazy. Now if you had asked me how I would feel about the I pad 3 years ago (if it had existed), I would have hated on Apple the same way out of prejudice against Mac OSX.
Luckily if you actually spend 3 years selling consumer electronics after being a tech for years back, you see that consumers don't want some sort of 1000 tool gadget that needs a 9 month course to use. IOS and Airplay are why I Pads sell like orgasm inducing hotcakes. Who wants to learn how to use 3-4 different devices that they interact with every single day and that don't work together? I Tunes allows those kinds of customers that can't figure out how to plug an I Pad into a computer with Itunes, as shown in the middle of the screen by a Itunes logo with a usb cable, luckily these people get the easy road from here on in. I tunes manages their average quality media sharing quite reliably and most importantly simple. Turn on sharing with with like 3 clicks, connect your Itunes account and connect wifi. Look in videos for shared videos, and Itunes for Music, seriously even these people can be explained those steps in store and they can get it working where all their media, web browsing, ebooks, and other documents are with them in a gadget they understand. Plus Apple's Airplay Accessory market is just beautiful and makes me want to cry for their competitors. I have been hoping for google and Microsoft to finally get their shit together and offer an easy to use load out of their devices for media streaming, cloud access, universal phone tethering for calls/texts/etc(I know only PlayBook kinda does this atm), and easy to connect Bluetooth integrated accessories. I know Android has more potential but that's why you ask consumers for $500 bucks because they expect that you have brought out all that potential not buried it underneath lag and incompatibilities.
Thanks for reading
and
Peace out

 

[derbene]

thg made some mistakes in understanding the google statistics.

there are 0,9% considered as xlarge
there are 2,8% considered as large
...

thg assumed only xlarge are tablets, what seems right because xlarge starts at about 7". problem is:

xlarge screens are at least 960dp x 720dp
large screens are at least 640dp x 480dp
normal screens are at least 470dp x 320dp
small screens are at least 426dp x 320dp

http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html

so al lot of very popular tablets like the galaxy tab, dell streak, blackberry playbook, acer iconia a100 and and and... have a screen with a diameter big enough considered as "xlarge", but not the resolution. so they can be found in the "large" section instead.
basically you can assume nearly everything in "xlarge" and "large" are tablets, because large is still too big for smartphones.
following to the fact, that out there are actually not 0,9% but 3,7% tablets, equivalent to 5million, that changes this story a bit