It’s no secret that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has been selling well in the States. It’s one of the few Android-powered tablet to have struck the perfect balance of content, power and price, and it’s been hugely successful because of that. But you may not have realised just how successful until now. Is there any point in any other manufacturers even bothering? 

Numbers have just arrived from comScore detailing Android tablet sales figures and market share in the US. And it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for Google. Spanning from December 2011 to February 2012, the stats see a continued rise in market share being swallowed up by Amazon’s tablet.

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By February this year, the 7-inch wunderkind represented over half of the total Android tablet market share, at 54.4 percent. That’s enormous, considering that the list also has devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab (the entire series lumped together only amounts to a 15.4 percent market share), the Motorola Xoom (with 7 per cent market share) and the Asus Transformer (6.3 percent).

It’s not good news for Google. The fact that the best way to sell an Android tablet over an iPad seems to be heavily skinning the OS and knocking the price right down isn’t exactly an aspirational result. We’ve said it before, but the thing that Google really needs right now is a Nexus tablet to call its own – something that the people can champion and get behind.

As it is, the budget Kindle Fire only shows half of what Android can really do, and we’d imagine a huge amount of Kindle Fire buyers don’t even realise that they’re buying an Android device. What does this data say to you? Are you surprised by any of the results?

Let us know your thoughts on the state of Android tablets in the comments section below.

Via Celluar-News

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  • James

    “Is there any point in any other manufacturers even bothering? ”

    Yes, ofcourse there is.  Content sales of digital media should drive those with e-Stores and the capability to build hardware (or have the necessary parters in the hardware field) to put a loss-leader to market to compete.

    As far as I know, despite being available for many months the Kindle Fire is still a US only device.

    The European market (and there are several other markets that I would suggest are still ‘unclaimed’ in this respect) is fairly sizeable, in my opinion Google should have pulled thier finger out and launched a competetive device over here and in the states. 
    It might have helped drive sales of thier books and other content in the recently re-branded Play store.

    Even in the US, they could launch a similar device, with higher specs (moores law, same price point, just developed later) and being a vanilla android device would be more versatile than the walled garden of the Kindle Fire (granted, techies can get around that, but the vast majority of punters like what something can do out-of-the-box).

    As things stand, I would imagine that there are a huge ammount of punters over this side of the pond with cash waiting for a Kindle Fire or similar bargain bit of kit (or two!)….. 

    I know I am.

  • Anonymous

    Totally agree ,James, I’ve been getting google alerts on MEMO & GOOGLE NEXUS[PLAY] tablet + newsletters from Tab Times everyday since the announcement of the impending[rumoured] release of the Memo 370T & the comments imply LOTS of us are anxiously waiting to put our money in google’s bank account if they would let us. The foot dragging could give us  too much time to window shop though & with items like the Samsung 7.7 Tab sitting on display to be oohed & wowed over, who knows?  

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