A report by Strategy Analytics claimed that "Android captured 27 percent of global tablet shipments" in the third quarter. This statement, while sensational, was misleading.
The wording used in this report obscures what should be obvious at a cursory glance: Apple's "healthy 67 percent global tablet market share" that it reports is vastly less than what it should be. The iPad is the best-selling tech gadget in history, and no Android tablet on the market today even comes close to displacing it, nor does the Android tablet market as a whole.
Kevin Tofel of GigaOM asked Strategy Analytics to clarify its numbers a bit, and then explained the following facts based on its answers:
"Tablet shipments" are not tablet sales
Tech companies regularly report how many units of a product they have "shipped," but "shipping" a gadget does not mean it was sold to an end customer. It means that it was moved from the manufacturer's warehouse into a retail store, and may well be sitting on the shelves collecting dust right now.
As an example, earlier this year a Samsung vice president was proud to announce that "around 2 million" 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tabs were shipped. He declined to give specific numbers about the number that had been sold to customers.
Definitions of "tablet" vary
Google's Android division worked overtime to bring Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" to market, the first version of Android that was specifically designed for tablets and not just smartphone-style devices with big screens. But the Strategy Analytics report counted budget, sub-$200 devices running 2.x versions of Android, as well as e-readers like the Barnes and Noble Nook Color that run Android under the hood (so to speak).
How Android tablets actually perform in sales
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is the only "real," Honeycomb-running Android tablet to have sold out so far. This was due partly to its sub-$400 price tag, and (probably) partly to a supply shortage. In other words, there weren't many made for that first shipment to begin with.
Google's developer dashboard only shows about 1 in 50 activated Android devices are tablets running some version of Honeycomb. As Tofel explains, that adds up to about 3.42 million Android tablets in existence ... not too bad of a comparison to Andy Rubin's number, which probably counted Android 2.x tablets as well. But a far cry from the 10+ million iPads that Apple sold just this quarter.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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