125 million Tablets might ship in 2012, thanks to Apple and Android

An analysis from Jefferies & Co., predicts that about 125 million tablets might be shipped in the year 2012. And while mentioning the term tablets they included tablets from all the tablets using various platforms including Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and also Microsoft’s Windows 8.

This figure is actually 25 million slashes from their earlier prediction estimated earlier this year. This change might have caused due to the consolidating on the market faster than it expected.

According to Jefferies analyst Peter Misek, Apple sold 40.5 million of the 70 million tablets shipped in 2011. Other manufacturers also contributed in this figure as 10 million were from Samsung and 4 million were Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Apart from Kindle Fire and a few tablet models most of the Android devices could not make sales according to the expectation of their manufacturers. Initially most of these devices were priced compared to Apple’s iPad, but later a few models like the Kindle Fire was priced as its features and were reported to be very successful. It is expected that the Kindle Fire may sale around 16 to 24 million units this year.

The other model as Motorola’s Xoom was priced at $699 on contract a year ago. It reported a sale of about 1 million for 2011. Apple managed a 15.4 million unit sales in the last quarter itself.

The merging of the Smartphones and Honeycomb branches into Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system may owe more offerings for Android believes Misek. He also believes that the tablet prices might fall to an average of $350.

He also believes that the market may be dominated by Apple with an assist from Android later in the future, but there will be a viable push from Microsoft with its Windows 8 platform. 

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