The tablet market continues to find itself in an interesting predicament. It was only a short few years ago when the tablet market saw its place very much cemented as your on-the-go middleman to your PC and smartphone. As the latter were too small for any real working, tablets seemed to be fit nicely as a go between your smartphone and your home setup.
That said, the last few years has seen some very clear movements from smartphone and laptop manufacturers. On the one side, smartphones continue to incrementally increase in size and have since developed their own phablet market by subsequently encroaching on the smaller sized tablets. Likewise, laptop (and some smartphone) manufacturers have also started to see the value in the likes of Chromebooks and reduced size laptops. Offering the user a product which is very close in size to the larger tablets, but with processing and multitasking powers which greatly exceed the tablets on offer. As such, tablets have felt themselves being squeezed at both ends of their market and since then, have seen consistent reports of decline in their sales and adoption rates.
According to a new report by Digitimes Research, this is a trend which is continuing. The report details that the tablet market globally saw a decline in the second quarter of 10-percent, compared to the first quarter. According to the info, global tablet sales in Q2 reached 45.76 million. As well as being a 10-percent drop on the previous quarter, this also represents a 15-percent drop year-on-year, further confirming the bigger decline picture of the tablet market in general. Of the overall figures, Apple remained in the number one spot with 10.3 million iPads shipped in Q2. Following which Samsung and Lenovo came in second and third respectively. The total for non-Apple branded tablets (including Microsoft options) came in at 18.86 million units while white box (typically thought of as generic and non-branded) options made up the remaining 16.6 million units for Q2. Interestingly, the non-Apple branded market saw a slightly less of a decline compared to the overall market, realizing a 7.6% drop sequentially. Either way though, the consistency across all sub-markets was a decline on the previous quarter and yearly shipment numbers.