Apple iPad Dominance Of Tablet Market Near Total
Tablets emerged as the technology buzzword of 2010 and the global market for the product has been growing at a torrid pace the majority of which has been driven by the iPad.
The market for media tablets grew by 45 per cent during the third quarter of 2010, with shipments reaching 4.8 million units, 87.4 per cent of which were Apple iPads.
“Apple definitively led the worldwide media tablet market in shipments and set the standard for technology innovation in 2010, with nearly 4.2 million units shipped in 3Q10 and an 87.4% share worldwide,” said market researcher IDC.
iPads were not the only tablet devices popular with consumers who also snapped up e-readers in 2010, also benefiting from a spike in popularity.
Third quarter 2010 global e-reader shipments grew by 40 per cent from the second quarter, hitting 2.7 million units.
Three quarters of the global market for e-readers is concentrated in the United States, as a result of leading manufacturers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble selling their products exclusively in that market or focusing on expanding their market share in the US market.
Amazon gained the title of market leader for the quarter shipping more than 1.1 million units and taking a 41.5 percent share of the worldwide market.
IDC believes both the e-reader and tablet markets will continue to grow throughout 2011. The research firm believes that e-reader shipments in 2010 will hit 10.8 million units globally, whilst shipments in 2011 and 2012 are expected to reach 14.7 million units and 16.6 million units respectively.
Demand will be driven by “price competition among e-paper-based device vendors, the introduction of colour display e-readers, and the expansion of digital book and periodical content offerings across genres and languages,” says IDC.
However it is the market for media tablets that IDC is most sanguine about, predicting that by the year 2012, 70.8 million will be shipped globally, nearly double the 44.6 million units that are expected to have shipped during 2010.
“Media tablet market growth is expected to accelerate significantly in 1Q11 with new products from multiple high-profile device vendors, including Motorola’s Xoom, based on Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook based on BlackBerry Tablet OS, growth in 2011 and beyond will be driven by device vendors introducing media tablets based on Android and other operating systems, as well as price and feature competition and strong demand in both the consumer and commercial segments.” IDC said.
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Corporations Expected To Increasingly Adopt Tablet Devices
A new survey by ChangeWave Research, tablets introduced by a variety of manufacturers from Dell to Apple are helping to drive corporate usage of the devices.
The survey polled IT buyers from 1,641 businesses and the results suggest that approximately 7 per cent of corporations issue their employees with tablets, a 1 per cent rise from the results of the last survey in August. Apple currently dominates the market with an 82 per cent market share, followed by HP which has an 11 per cent market share, and Dell which has a 7 per cent market share.
HP’s whose tablet offering is a Windows powered 8.9 inch Slate 500 said in November that its device was on backorder due to “extraordinary demand,” In 2011, HP is widely expected to release tablets running its recently acquired Palm webOS.
Dell currently has a 5 inch tablet offering called the Streak which runs the Android 2.2 operating system, but has revealed it is developing a range of devices with a variety of screen sizes.
ChangeWave says that the market for corporate tablet devices is poised for rapid expansion in 2011, with 14 per cent of corporations saying they intended to purchase tablets for the first time during the first quarter of the year.
“In other words, the total number of companies making use of tablet devices is set to double in just the next three months—an explosive surge in demand going forward,” Paul Carton, ChangeWave’s vice president of research wrote.
The overwhelming majority (78 per cent) of IT buyers said they intended to purchase iPads, whilst 9 per cent each said they would by Dell or BlackBerry Tablets, 8 per cent said they would consider an HP device and 4 per cent said they were looking at Samsung Galaxy Tab.
“Although the release of the RIM PlayBook isn’t expected until late-1st Quarter 2011, RIM (9 percent) is now tied with Dell (9 percent) for second place in terms of future buying—a positive development for the Canadian manufacturer,” Carton wrote.
Apple Argues The Line Between Personal And Business Devices Increasingly Blurred
Remember the time when the BlackBerry was the dominant smartphone in the market, and there was simply no question of adopting alternative devices. BlackBerry’s grew everywhere, from the kitchen table to the boardroom. 
So popular did the BlackBerry become, that many began calling the device the CrackBerry instead, implying that owners could not live without them, and their addiction to the device was as powerful as crack.
The BlackBerry’s popularity parlayed the Canadian manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) into a $34 billion behemoth, with 41 million users worldwide, with over half of all corporate smartphone users owning a BlackBerry device.
A tectonic shift occurred in the industry however when Apple launched its smartphone offering the iPhone, on the back of its hugely successful iPod with the stated ambitions of consuming a large fraction of RIM’s multi-billion dollar pie.
Three years after the launch of the iPhone, for the first time, the device outsold the BlackBerry during September quarter. Apple shifted 14.1 million iPhones compared with 12.1 million BalckBerry’s.
According to Cupertino based Apple, the iPhone is much more than a device for simply sending and receiving e-mail on the go. With its sleek design, uber cool touchscreen and ability to run hundreds of thousands of applications designed for nearly any purpose, the line between business and personal device has become increasingly blurred.
RIM’s response to the threat from Apple was to launch a range of devices which are both flashier and more user friendly, which incorporate both touch-screen’s and QWERYTY keyboards. RIM has also created an application store which has 15,000 applications compared with Apple’s 300,000.
Apple’s traditional strength lies in the consumer segment of the electronic market, and for a long time has been little more than an also ran in the enterprise market. The company however of late has begun redefining its position in that segment, making a compelling argument that that when it comes to smartphones and tablets, the line between a corporate and personal device is increasingly blurred and unnecessary.
“We’re not developing two different lines like many companies do with enterprise versions and consumer versions,” Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, said in an October conference call with investors. “This is another part of our simplistic approach to things that I think will pay us great dividends, and it’s already starting to do so.”
According to Apple, nearly 80 per cent of companies included in the Fortune 500 are testing the iPhone in some way, though it admits the tests usually involve only a small number of users.
Sanofi Aventis, a big pharmaceutical company has begun issuing iPhones and iPads to 1500 workers and says it intends to continue migrating its employees onto Apple’s platform by giving them the option of replacing their company issued BlackBerry’s with an Apple device.
Sanofi says that Apple Apps enable employee’s to monitor drug sales and marketing performance using their iPad, as well as watch live presentations by colleagues over the internet.
“True mobility is now kicking in,” said Vic Rupinder, a senior technology manager at Sanofi in an interview with the LA Times. “You’re no longer tied to your desktop, so you can do work while you’re moving around.”
Even with all the hoopla surrounding Apple, and its immense popularity with consumers, Ashok Kumar, technology analyst with Rodman & Renshaw says that the BlackBerry is “still the gold standard” for mobile smart phones.
Mr. Kumar argues that displacing an incumbent is a time consuming process, particularly in the world of corporate IT, which has a tendency to be cautious in adopting new devices and technology, and can often be slow moving.
Many enterprises get locked into contracts with telecommunications companies for long periods of time, and worry that any sudden major changes may result in problems for day to day operations.
“It’s not the kind of thing that can happen overnight,” Kumar said. Giving employees a completely different kind of mobile device is “much more of an open- heart surgery. So if it’s a sunset for RIM, it’s going to be a very long sunset.”
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Rivalry Between Apple And BlackBerry Intensifying
At the Web 2.0 summit held this week, Research In Motion’s Co-CEO made some disparaging remarks regarding the app strategy embarked upon by Apple, which were a reflection of an increasingly bitter rivalry between the two companies. The comments came against a backdrop of reports that a number of company’s have made early commitments for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which suggests that competition within the corporate tablet market is likely to be especially intense.
The rivalry between RIM and Apple has been simmering for quite some time now, with RIM taking it to another level at this week’s Web 2.0 summit when it showed a video which compared its PlayBook tablet to the iPad. The video suggested that the RIM tablet rendered websites faster, runs Flash and performed better on standardized tests when compared with an iPad.
RIM says it will launch the PlayBook in Early 2011 and has set a price point below US$500.
Jim Balsillie co-CEO of Research in Motion traded barbs with Apple chief Steve Jobs last month, after Mr. Jobs claimed that Apple had managed to outsell BlackBerry during the September quarter.
“I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future,” Mr. Jobs said during the company’s earnings call.
Mr. Jobs added that he did not believe that smaller 7-inch tablet offerings such as the BlackBerry PlayBook would manage to obtain a sizeable market.
“We think the 7-inch tablets will be dead on arrival, and manufacturers will realize they’re too small and abandon them next year. They’ll then increase the size, abandoning the customers and developers who bought into the smaller format,” he predicted.
Mr. Balsillie responded by suggesting that Mr. Jobs’ comments were irrelevant to people “who live outside of Apple’s distortion field. We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple,”
BlackBerry which has effectively cornered the market in the enterprise section of the mobile internet device market faces an increased threat from Apple as the company continues to make inroads. With the launch of the PlayBook next year, RIM is aiming to attract back some of the business users who have defected to Apple and use iPhones and iPads. The PlayBook is being marketed primarily as a business device, whilst the iPad has more of a consumer element to its marketing.
According to the Bloomberg news agency, RIM has indeed achieved some success in wooing corporate customers to its platform. SunLife Financial has agreed to purchase 1000 PlayBooks, and other corporate customers have also committed to testing and purchasing the product.
“The encryption was really the clincher in opting for the PlayBook,” Sun Life senior vice president Tom Reid said.
Apple is increasing its push into the enterprise market for tablets with Mr. Jobs saying: “We haven’t pushed [the iPad] real hard in business, and it’s being grabbed out of our hands,”
Apple claims that over 65 percent of the Fortune 100 are already deploying or trying the iPad.
“We’ve got a tiger by the tail here, and this is a new model of computing which we’ve already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone, and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, both personal and business,” he said.
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More Companies Evaluating Or Adopting Apple iPhone For Corporate Messaging
The two largest US banks have begun actively testing the Apple iPhone as a potential replacement for company issued BlackBerry devices 
According to Bloomberg a financial news agencies, the two lenders have begun evaluating security software which has been designed to support corporate messaging on Apple’s iPhone device.
The two banks currently employ over a quarter of a million people each globally.
Neither bank has yet made plans to allow their employees to use iPhones for corporate messaging public yet, but it is believed that their testing involves thousands of users.
The corporate mobile messaging market was once seen as the exclusive domain of Research In Motion (RIM’s) BlackBerry platform, due to its robust security protocols, but of late the company has begun to slowly see its dominance erode as a result of the popularity of other smartphone devices such as the iPhone with consumers, who have lobbied their employers for the option of using their personal devices to send and receive corporate messages.
Many companies have been sympathetic to employee requests for permission to use their iPhones for corporate messaging largely because Apple made enterprise support a key engineering priority. Apple added features such as Exchange Server messaging, VPN and enterprise authentication methods.
Since Apple embarked on its strategy of making its mobile phone device more attractive to corporations, the company has witnessed a dramatic spike in interest from Fortune 500 companies, with Steve Jobs, Apple CEO claiming that 80 per cent of those companies have either adopted or evaluating the device as of last month.
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