It’s a lost affair for tablets as shipments continue to fall

It was just a phase and people seem to be moving over it rather quickly. The love for tablets seems to be fading faster than experts expected. As per the latest data released by market researcher IDC on Monday, tablet sales dropped down to 38.7 million devices shipped, falling more than 12 percent in the second quarter of 2016. This marks a drop in tablet sales for the seventh consecutive quarter.

The tablet was the ‘hot tech’ at the beginning of this decade; however, its fortunes started to dwindle from the last quarter of 2014 with the users turning to bigger screen phones, which offered better specifications along with a large screen size. The downtrend that started then has continued till date.

“The market has spoken as consumers and enterprises seek more productive form factors and operating systems. However, the next 12 to 18 months will be very interesting as Google launches the next version of Android with better multi-tasking support and as they begin to bring together their two operating systems,” said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC.

As for the distribution of the players in the niche, Google’s Android operating system remains at the top and accounts for 65 percent of shipments, despite some major OEMs washing their hands of Android tablets. Android is followed by Apple’s iOS platform which accounted for with 26 percent and finally, Microsoft’s Windows OS which has a 9 percent market share.

Company wise, Apple accounted for the bulk of tablet sales, shipping almost 10 million units in the quarter. It was followed by Samsung and Lenovo. Growth was on the decline for both Apple and Samsung however, who saw business go down by 9.2 percent and 24.5 percent respectively.

Huawei and Amazon also managed to make it to the top 5 thanks to a decent — and in Amazon’s case, 4 digit — year over year shipment growth. While Huawei’s tablet business grew by 71 percent, leading to around 2.2 million shipped tablets, Amazon managed to offload 1.6 million tablets at a staggering 1,208 percent y-o-y increase.