According to Gartner Research, tablet sales will increase from 60 million units in 2011 to 118.9 million units in 2012. iOS is expected to have 61.4 percent of all tablet sales, with 170 million tablets total sold by 2016.
“Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “As vendors struggled to compete on price and differentiate enough on either the hardware or ecosystem, inventories were built and only 60 million units actually reached the hands of consumers across the world. The situation has not improved in early 2012, when the arrival of the new iPad has reset the benchmark for the product to beat.”
Gartner expects iOS to reach nearly 73 million units compared to just 38 million for Android (31 percent of the market) in 2012. They expect that more than 369 million tablets will be in the market by 2016.
