Tablets Will Boom in Australia

Analysts have been keeping an eye on the tablet market for quite a while now, and it looks like they found great growth potential in a certain continent known as Australia, especially as far as the Apple iPad 2 is concerned.

Tablets may have been looked upon as devices with a low probability of success on a netbook-filled worldwide market, but they shattered this view rather quickly.

Actually, one might say that the Apple iPad alone shattered that idea by selling by the tens of thousands in the first weeks, prompting notebook and smartphone makers to make their own slates.

Said companies haven't had much success in promoting their products, especially because of the low number of apps in the Android Market.

IDC looked at how tablets have been doing in Australia recently, and it found that there was room for much improvement in terms of sales.

In fact, with the iPad 2 already making rounds there, sales are expected to grow by 85% by the end of the ongoing year alone (2011), both for consumers and for the business sector.

"Although this year will be dominated by consumer purchases of media tablets, many CIOs are looking at these devices as an opportunity to improve their end user environment so we will see increasing adoption in the enterprise that may be tied to client virtualisation solutions," said IDC senior market analyst, Trevor Clarke.

"The question will be whether these organizations can build a compelling business case for deployment and realize mature use cases to ensure true value is achieved."

Besides the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Optus My Tab and Telstra T-touch have been released there, although they didn't really prove to be much of a challenge to the iPad.

Still, even if their share doesn't grow much, their overall shipments definitely will, considering that 2010 only saw 500,000 media slates shipped in total until December 31, 2010.