Market researcher Gartner reports the tablet market is not returning to the levels of growth seen in the last couple of years as demand for tablets will continue to be slow in 2015. The company estimates that this year 233 million tablet will be sold, 8% more than last year.
"The collapse of the tablet market in 2014 was alarming," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. "In the last two years global sales of tablets were growing in double-digits."
According to Atwal the steep drop can be explained by the extended lifetime of tablets and the lack of innovation in hardware. The sales of all devices, which besides tablets also includes PCs, notebooks and smartphones will grow with 3.9% to 2.5 billion devices.
Android continues to be the most used operating system. In 2014 more than 1 billion devices were running Google's OS. Gartner expects that number to grow to nearly 1.5 billion devices in 2015.
iOS/Mac OS from Apple was already surpassed by Windows from Microsoft and will likely also not come close this year. According to Atwal that's because of the expected stabilization of the PC market and the challenge for Apple to realize significant growth with its iPhones.
Since 2014 the tablet market grows much slower than the previous years . The number of iPad sales declined for the first time in 2014. The collapse of the tablet market is mainly caused by a saturated market, many household already own one or more tablets. Tablets also last longer than manufacturers expected which causes consumers to replace their devices slower than expected.
