The market for Android tablets appears hotter for less expensive small slates than their bigger, pricier counterparts. On Friday, Animoca, a cross-platform app publisher of entertainment products for Android devices, shared its internal data of the Android tablet market. The figures come from Animoca users around the world for one month, ending March 20, with a sample size of 978,000. When figuring market share, the company assumes that 75 million Android tablets are in use.
Animoca notes that there are numerous Android tablets that follow this list, but Samsung, Amazon and Google are clearly the bigger players here. Note that Google’s Nexus 7 is actually built by Asus, which has a few larger slates on the list.
Assuming Animoca’s data is representative of the Android tablet market at large, it shows the development of the trends spotted in late 2010: small tablets have some advantages over larger ones. The lower costs are surely a factor but the improved portability over their larger cousins could be influencing the market as well.
This actually could bode well for Microsoft if it is indeed planning a smaller version of its Surface tablets. The current product line doesn’t appear to be making a huge dent in the tablet or PC markets just yet. If the company can keep the costs down — Surface RT is too expensive compared to Intel Atom Windows 8 tablets, in my opinion — while focusing the experience on touch-friendly applications, a smaller Surface could outsell its big brothers.
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