Hasta La Gadget!

Oct 19

Only 3.8 Million Honeycomb Tablets Sold So Far

Posted in: Android, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Honeycomb accounts for just 1.8% of traffic to the Android Market. Graph: Android.com

Android developer Al Sutton crunched some Google numbers and came up with the following result: Only 3.4 million Android Honeycomb tablets have been sold. That’s less tablets than Apple sold iPhones this last weekend.

Sutton took Android’s “current distribution” numbers, which show the various slices of the Android pie occupied by the various version. V3.x, the tablet-only Honeycomb OS, manages 1.8 percent of the total.

The next part was even easier. Google’s quarterly financial results from last week. According to Larry Page, a total of 190 million Android devices have been activated. There is some speculation that Google counts an activation every time a handset updates its OS, but we’ll take this figure as an actual total.

So, dividing total device numbers by Honeycomb marketshare, we get 3.42 million. And that’s for all Honey tablet makers combined.

Why? My guess is that Android tablets look too much like desktop computers in terms of UI. I don’t think the new Ice Cream Sandwich will change things, either. Regular folks don’t buy “tablets”. They buy “iPads.” Android tablets are like netbooks: Nerds buy them to play with, people on a budget buy them and then hate them. Except in this case, the iPad is actually cheaper than many “budget” tablets.

And wait for Amazon’s Kindle fire to arrive. It will probably put an almost total end to Android tablets.

Google’s Honeycomb offensive musters just 3.4m tablets [Slashgear]

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