Android’s sheer amount of variety is a double edged sword. It offers unprecedented an number of choices for a customer, letting him/her select an Android device according to any specific set of needs.
However, the fact that there is no single dominant force in the market for Android devices means that sales are staggered across a plethora of companies, often with low profits, if any.
The Android tablet market has been particularly affected by the dominance of the Apple iPad. So far, there has been only one certified success story among the endless number of Android tablets that get churned out by manufacturers every month – the Amazon Kindle Fire.
The smartest thing that Amazon did with its Kindle Fire was to position it in a different market segment from the all-conquering Apple iPad. With a $199 price tag, the user bases looking at buying the Kindle Fire were, more often than not, mutually exclusive from the lot aspiring for Apple iPads.
The Kindle Fire was the first legitimate budget tablet in the market, with a respectable set of features and a dedicated content ecosystem, and, from comScore’s latest reports, Amazon has indeed struck upon a winning formula for Android tablets at long last.
Since its November 2011 launch, the Kindle Fire’s market share has been progressively increasing every month. If December 2011 gave it a market share of 29.4% among Android tablets, it increased to 41.8% in the following month. The latest figures from February give it a market share of a whopping 54.4% – almost double from the December figures.
comScore’s report indicates that the Kindle Fire has been a viable competitor in the general tablet market, as its adoption rate has been escalating almost exponentially. On the other hand, the more high profile Samsung Galaxy Tab family’s market share has dipped from nearly a quarter of the Android tablet market to barely over 15%. Other premium offerings such as the Sony Tablet S had price tags in iPad-esque territory, and have consequently done very poorly, not managing to breach even 1% of the total Android tablet market.
[via PRNewsWire]
