Tablet Sales For 2011: Huge

Motorola's Xoom tablet running Android 3.0 looks to be a winner.

Apple's iPad brought the long-mythical tablet market to life in 2010, selling over 15 million units. Some competition showed up late in the year: Android-based tablets, running a version of Android designed around smartphone usage. None of them really took off, which was not surprising given the compromises made to get them to market quickly. Now the situation is different: Over 40 tablets were shown at CES, most of them based on Android 3.0, the new version of Android designed specifically for use with tablets.

The forecast for tablet sales in 2011 is somewhere around 55 million, with total sales expected to hit over 200 million in 2014. Apple's share of sales next year will be about 36 million units. So the total size of the tablet market in 2011 will be somewhere over 70 million, counting those iPads and Android tablets already sold. That's a pretty reasonable market... more than the number of PSP's sold, for instance. About half the number of Nintendo DS units sold so far.

But tablets aren't just from Apple and Android; HP will be introducing its new line of WebOS tablets and phones, based on their purchase of Palm. The operating system was pretty slick, and with HP's size behind it they have a chance.

And then there's Microsoft... poor guys, they just can't seem to get on board these trends fast enough. They're working on a new version of Windows that will run on ARM chips, and supposedly Windows 8 will be able to run more nicely on a tablet... if you really are interested in running Windows on a tablet. Maybe they'll instead scale up Windows Phone 7 for tablets, though that has just seemed to lie there despite positive reviews. If Microsoft is going to get serious about these markets, shouldn't they be spending some serious dough on marketing? You'd think so.

I haven't even touched on dedicated e-reader sales for 2011... which will probably be upwards of 20 million units. Between tablets, e-readers, and smartphones, there will be many ways for people to read e-books. The e-book market will continue to grow rapidly.

Developers who have titles soon for Android 3.0 tablets will likely see solid sales, as new buyers look for something that will show off their new toy. Games will no doubt continue to be one of the top product categories for tablets. Gaming is going to be in even more places than ever before... do you have a plan for this?