Gartner Predicts 665 Million Tablets In Use By 2016

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Ingrid Lunden, on TechCrunch, writes that Gartner Predicts 665 Million Tablets In Use By 2016 and 45% of those will be iPads.

With growth of almost 100% this year, the iPad is still the device of choice. Other vendors will add to their marketshare, but Apple will still dominate the market. Lunden notes: “One opportunity ripe for the taking — not just by Microsoft but others, too — is the enterprise market. Gartner says that 35 percent of all tablets will be sold for business use by 2015, although many of those purchases will be in the vein of “BYO” devices.”

As we’ve seen via our Mobile Workforce Survey and Report, 64 percent of mobile workers use a tablet, yet 75% of those had to purchase it for themselves.

Tablets provide a different use case to smartphones due to additional computing functionality and the larger screen for content consumption. However, like smartphones, “Gartner says that about half of all tablet owners replace their devices within 24 months of buying them.”

Gartner analysts also found that 40% of the apps that a user has are on both devices. Not only should app developers look to making a tablet version with the smartphone version, but make sure to provide both iOS and Android versions for those users with different platforms. (Ahem).

Tags: Android, iPad, smartphone, tablet