14 DAY TRIAL // Tablets may not have sold a lot in previous years, but they have started to ship better than desktops and laptops now.
Their progress has been so fast that analysts, like those from research firm Forrester, have very high hopes for the net half a decade.
It's actually kind of like it was for netbooks a few years back, before tablets showed up. Analysts believed they would sell in the millions upon millions too, but they ended up falling off the cliff as soon as slates showed up.
True, tablets don't have that sort of a threat coming, unless wearable displays like Google Glass count.
Anyway, Forrester predicts that tablet shipments would reach 381 million in 2017.
Add to that all the slates that sold so far, and those that will sell between now and then, and you have 905 million tablets all over the world.
Enterprise purchases will account for 18% of the total.