Tech Giants Seek to Revive Tablet Market Growth
iPad has marked the dawn of tablet market in 2010. With sleek design and great functionality, it became a big success.
But eventually, the tablet market has cooled a bit, pinching many players, including the dominating Apple Inc. After Apple, Samsung became the second largest player experiencing a growth rate of 5 percent. iPad emerged more popular in developed markets in terms of high penetration.
Saturation
According to IDC, a market research group, the growth in the tablet market will be 19.4 percent in 2014 which is quite lower than the 51.6 percent growth clocked in 2013.
Changing Patterns
There is shift in demand in the tablet market. The new growth is coming from developing markets of China and India. In these markets, the affordably priced Android-powered tablets are getting high demand. The familiarity of the consumers with the Android software is backed by reduced prices and aggressive marketing by Samsung. Lenovo has made Android tablets to achieve an edge in the past Apple tablets.
Apple the Leader
Based on global market share, Apple is ahead of Samsung. In shipments, the first quarter of 2014 shows that Apple's iPads accounted for 32.5 percent of the total shipments where as Samsung tablets were 22.3 percent of the total shipments.
Samsung Strategy
Samsung has a special focus in attaining more growth in the segment. The introduction of a flagship line of superslim tablets - Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 - shows that Samsung is very focused on portability and super-bright screens to gain more attention.
Samsung pitches the valued features in the newly launched tablets. The highlight is that of the quality of the tablet screens with vivid colors and crisp images.
Some of the new features are also aimed at families. For example, the fingerprint scanner helps to switch between multiple users. Added security features for parents will turn off children. The full kids' mode allows specific screen time limits.