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So after 10 months on the market Honeycomb is now on just under 9 million tablets. Is 9 million good? Or is a failure the tech press has made it out to be. On that note I'm willing to bet if you asked them how many Honeycomb tablets have been sold, most would give you a number well below 9 million.
Even given the decent numbers they're not exactly flying off the shelves, especially compared to the iPad which has sold 15 million in Q4 alone. The Kindle Fire, which everyone is calling the most successful Android tablet sold just 5 million in Q4. But looking at the chart you can see Honeycomb tablets have sold 5.35 million in the last 3 months, putting it on par with the Kindle Fire. Clearly as a whole Honeycomb tablets are doing fairly well, but an individual tablet manufacturer, not so much. The manufactures that make up that portion of Honeycomb tablets include; Samsung, ASUS, HTC, LG, Acer and Toshiba, just to name a few.
I look forward to seeing how Android fares in 2012. I expect with the arrival of improved hardware, more competitive pricing and Ice Cream Sandwich, Android tablets will continue to grow market share. It's a shame it will be so difficult to track as Google's platform version numbers only shows the percentage by version number and not by type. It's only because Honeycomb was a tablet only OS that I was able to keep track of it's growth over the past several months.
Because of that it's likely there are many more Android tablets already in use today running an older version of Android original built for phones. In all likelihood, there are at least twice as many tablets as I have charted here. Hence the reason I titled this Honeycomb tablet growth, as apposed to Android tablet growth.
Up to now the growth has been slow, but it is growth and in the face of the shear dominance of the iPad it's fairly impressive. I suspect if we add up Honeycomb, 2.x, Nook and Kindle tablets together, they likely account for 50% of the tablet market. I know many market analyst's have said the iPad will dominate until 2015. But from the numbers I'm looking at, the change is coming much sooner than many people will expect.
In 2012, the iPad will be the single biggest seller, but as a whole Android tablets will outsell the iPad.
Source:
Google 'Platform Versions' (Updated Monthly)
Android and Me 'Google: 250 million Android devices' (Jan 19, 2012)
Android Central 'Android version numbers' (Dec 1, 2011)
The Verge 'Google: 200 million Android devices' (Nov 16, 2011)
Android Central 'Latest Android version numbers released' (Oct 4, 2011)
Android Police 'Google: 150 Million Android Devices' (Aug 15, 2011)
BGR 'Google: Android activations up to 550,000 per day' (July 15, 2011)
TNW 'Google now activates 500,000 Android devices every day' (June 28th, 2011)
Mashable 'Google: 100 Million Android Devices' (May 10, 2011)
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Dave Loft
Reader Comments (4)
i love posts like this. It never doesn't amaze me when people just will apple to fail. Why? i have no idea. The iPad deserves it's spot, it's miles and away the best tablet out there, and i own more android tablets than you. (assuming you have two or less, lol)
I would love to know what you think you can do on a android device that you can't on a iOS device. (apart from run some app that has an equivalent on the other platform.) Android is doing fine. But go on and rock those muttons and make your graphs based on your artistic interpretation of google's numbers. While your at it, have fun deleting my post, lol.
January 19th Google announces 250 million total devices and 700,000 devices a day. February 1st Google updates the platform version numbers which shows 3.4% of Android devices running Honeycomb.
Given 700,000 devices a day times 13 days and then add that to 250 million and it makes 259.1 million Android devices as of February 1st. Take 259.1 million and times it by 3.4% and it gives a total of 8.8094 million Honeycomb tablets, rounded to 2 decimal places that's 8.81 million.
This is the math I've done every month since July and there's nothing artistic about it. It's as accurate as it can be based on the information that is made public by Google.
Even the Verge have used this math to calculate the total number of Honeycomb tablets.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/14/2489998/google-android-honeycomb-tablets-sales-3-42-million
According Andy Rubin from Google there are now 12 million Android tablets activated and in use in the market. This is the first time Google has mentioned tablet numbers. It includes all tablets with Google services running 2.x, 3.x and 4.0. Even though Google considers them Android tablets the numbers do not include the Kindle Fire or the Nook Tablet. The Verge - Google to 'double down' on Android tablets in 2012, says Andy Rubin