Few Own Tablet PCs, Smartphones, Report Says
Despite the furor surrounding the iPad 2’s launch, only 0.3 percent of the world’s population owned a tablet PC in 2010, according to a recent report by analyst Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets.
Anticipating that new entries from Apple, RIM, Google, Dell, Asus, Motorola and dozens of other manufacturers will help greatly expand the market, the investment bank’s 88-page report predicts there will be more than 400 million tablet users worldwide by 2014.
That may spell bad news for Steve Jobs, however. Although Abramsky believes that more than 185 million slate computers will be sold in 2014 alone, as our friends at Business Insider note, he predicts that Google and its Android operating system, not Apple, will dominate the market. Microsoft, BlackBerry and HP are presumed to trail.
For a look at the proposed breakdown by market share, and an interesting chart that puts the overall newness and growth potential of smartphones and tablets against other technologies in perspective, see here.