Only 1.2 Million Honeycomb Tablets In The Wild

This comes even as 6 months have passed since the launch of the platform.

The number of Android smartphones in the market is increasing at a rate of knots, but sadly the same is not the case with Android tablets. It's already known that Android tablets are not available in large numbers in the market. With the head-start that the iPad has received, it has been quite hard for the Droid tablets to catch up in terms of sales. With the likes of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Acer Iconia Tab, and others launching very recently, things have seemed a bit better, but not so much as to brag about it.

Now, we have access to the number of Android tablets that are in circulation around the world which gives us an estimate of the droids with bigger displays. Google's Larry Page recently mentioned that there are about 135 million Android devices in the market, which includes both tablets and handsets. Taking into account the stats obtained from the Android Market according to which 0.9% of the devices that accessed the application store between June 24 and July 1 had display sizes of 7"and above or Xlarge. When we crunch both the numbers i.e. multiply 130 million by 0.9, we get a mere 1.21 million and odd. This certainly shows that there aren't enough Android tablets out there.

For the open sourced nature of the Android platform, this is a very disappointing number. However, we must mention here that this is an approximation and the real number may differ. Also worth a mention is that contrary to these numbers, Samsung has previously reported that it has shipped (not sold) about 2 million of the first gen Galaxy Tabs. This however doesn't necessarily mean that all the units have been sold. The calculations here however refer to the Android 3.0 and 3.1 tablets that have been sold so far, thus excluding tablets such as the Galaxy Tab. This number also doesn't include the tablets that didn't head over to the Android Market during the last week of June till July 1.

The numbers are a bit alarming for Google, considering the fact that Honeycomb was launched roughly 6 months ago, though countries such as India were a bit late to the party. Seems like there aren't enough manufacturers showing faith with Google's tablet oriented OS. However, that could change in the coming days with manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, and others geared up for the launch of Android 3.1 tablets. The companies need to launch the tablets in appropriate markets to make a difference in sales. Google has learnt from its mistakes after Android 3.0 and hence launched Android 3.1 with improved features, which brings a lot of newness to the tablet version of Android. Head over to GigaOm to get a brief idea as to how these numbers are calculated.