Our iPad Rentals Yield Some Perspective on Apple’s Tablet Dominion

They said it a year ago and they’ll be saying it years from now: the iPad is dominating the market.

A new report from DigiTimes predicts that Apple will send out 40 million iPads by the end of the year, giving it a "61 percent share of the market." As the world’s leading provider of iPad rental offerings, we can’t claim that this is news – but we can claim that the figures seem a little bunk.

We know, from first hand experience, that it’s the oh-so-popular iPad that consumers (both enterprise and personal alike) are after. We get requests for 3,000 of them in Abu Dabai, or 200 of them in Australia. Very rarely do requests come in for less than fifty units – so it’s usually large-scale markets we’re entertaining.

Very rarely do we get requests for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, RIM PlayBook, or the HP Slate 500 – but the calls do come in.

But DigiTimes seems to be stating that "In the first six months of 2011, tablet shipments increased more than 420 percent from the previous year, with sales expected to increase into the second half to boost the number of shipments by 150 percent from a year earlier. Apple is expected to contribute more than 25.5 million iPad shipments in the second half of the year alone, up 76 percent compared to the first half of the year."

To this we say: yes, of course tablet shipments are increasing 420 percent. A year ago, the public didn’t even know what a tablet was. Now, thanks to the iPad and Apple’s killer marketing team, they do. And now the other manufacturers can take advantage.

A whole lot of advantage, according to DigiTimes. Company officials said "Outside of the iPad, all eyes will be Android developments, as the platform has been extending its reach in the tablet sector even more rapidly than it did in the smartphone sector, with a penetration rate reaching more than 30 percent."

I get where DigiTimes is coming from, I just don’t think it will be twenty to thirty percent-worth of an advantage, as, at last check, most legitimate polls were putting the iPad’s market dominance at eighty or ninety percent.

We’re going to go ahead and guess that it will be about five years before tablets truly penetrate the market.