Tablet Sales Quadrupled Last Quarter, eReaders Not So Much

The market analysts at IDC have been reading the tea leaves again, and they say that tablet sales are up significantly this last quarter, while eBook reader sales reportedly dropped a smidgen over the previous quarter.

Aside from the from in eReader sales, there wasn’t anything surprising in the IDG estimates. Amazon continued to maintain a dominant position in eReaders, and led the field with a 51% market share. Barnes & Noble came in a solid second with 21%. Total eReader sales are estimated to be up167% over the same quarter last year to 5.4 million units sold. Also, IDC threw some bones and now believes that eReader shipments will increase significantly through the the end of the year, reaching a total of 27 million units sold for the year, up from a previous wild guess of 16 million units.

Now, tablets are the surprise. IDC’s Ouija board told them that tablet sales are up 89% over the first quarter and up 303% over the same quarter last year.

Apple dominated the markt with over 9 million iPads sold (68%, and up a smidgen drab from Q1). The Blackberry Playbook was the surprise winner of the non-iPad tablets; IDC estimated that RIM achieved a 5% market share. With 13.6 million tablets sold last quarter, that would mean over 600 thousand Playbooks are in the hands of customers.

And because of the surge in Playbook, the Android market share dropped significantly, down to 26% from 34% the previous quarter.  IDC also raised its shipment guess for 2011 to 62.5 million units, up from a previous projection of 53.5 million units.

I, for one, am looking forward to IDC’s figured for Q3. The brief surge in sales of the cancelled HP TouchPad will cause some interesting distortions in the tablet market. There was enough of a frenzy of the clearance sale that the iPad might even see a dip in its market share.

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