Personal smartphones and tablets are infiltrating the workspace faster than ever, and the push is being LED by Apple’s iOS.
According to a report by Good Technology, the iOS tablet activations were higher than total Android mobile device activations in the second quarter of 2011. Out of all the mobile device activations, 27 per cent were iPads.
“In the second quarter of 2011, the most striking thing is users (surveyed by Good Technology) activated more iPad tablets than Android smartphones and tablets combined,” said John Herrema, senior vice president of corporate strategy at Good Technology.
“While Android may be gaining smartphone market share with consumers, our business users are clearly gravitating to the iPad and doing so in large numbers. This is especially true in the Financial Services sector, which drove nearly half of all Good’s iPad activations over the quarter.”
Among the smartphones alone, the company saw 66 per cent iPhone activations compared to 33 per cent Android smartphone activations. The momentum is clearly in favour of iPad since Android came late to the party, and there is no enterprise emphasis in Android tablets.
The Android tablets are primarily seen as personal devices, whereas iPad appears suitable for both personal and office uses.
Right now, iPad is well entrenched in the market whereas Android tablets is yet to come close to the Apple device in terms of sales numbers. But it’s not practical for iPad to be able to sustain such a large lead for a long time, and Android is likely to do some serious catching up soon.
On this regard, the Good Technology says, “As we saw with Android smartphones over the course of 2010, we do expect Android to narrow this huge gap in tablet activations. However, we don’t see that happening in 2011. The iPad 2 simply has too much momentum.”