Over 40 percent consumers globally now have tablet

Relaxnews

New data from Global Web Index (GWI) shows that even though their popularity seems to be on the wane, tablets are just a few percentage points away from being ubiquitous household items
Across the 32 regions around the world that GWI monitors, 44% of internet using adults claim to have a tablet. When the data is sifted further, the countries most in love with tablets are Hong Kong, Spain and Portugal, where ownership is at the 58% mark.
They are closely followed by Turkey and The Philippines (56%), while 54% of adult internet users in the UK, South Africa, Italy and
Singapore are tablet owners.
GWI notes that without exception, the countries with the most tablets are in mature markets and that ownership in emerging countries is very low, as large screen smartphones are more and more the device of choice.
Despite the large number of competing tablets released in 2011, so far none of them have managed to gain considerable traction as the market continued to be dominated by the iPad and iPad 2. Several manufacturers had to resort to deep discounts to move excess inventory, as what happened with the HP TouchPad (after its announced discontinuation) and the BlackBerry Playbook. It has been suggested that many companies, in their rush to jump on the ‘tablet bandwagon’, had released products that might have had decent hardware but lacked refinement and came with software bugs that needed updates.
According to IDC, Android have 63% of all ‘media tablet’ sales in 2013 and rising and Windows is also rising in market share. Apple’s iPad had 83% of all ‘media tablet’ sales in 2010 and 28 percent of market share in 2013. At the unveiling of the iPad 2 in March 2011, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPad held more than 90 percent market share, but the difference between the figures could be explained by the difference between the amount of hardware shipped into the channel versus the number that have been actually sold.