1 Android tablet sold for every 24 iPads sold

Not that iPad needed a proof that it is the best tablet out there, simple math done by John Gruber of Daring Fireball actually reveals that very few Android tablets were sold and iPad is indeed the king of tablets. Only 1.21 million Android tablets were sold versus 28.73 million iPads sold.

Based on the numbers available in the public domain, for every 24 iPads sold only 1 Android tablet is being sold. That is a really low figure for an operating system which is embraced by all the manufacturers barring few like Nokia, RIM and Apple. There are more than 100 different Android tablet manufacturers out there.

Here’s how the numbers were arrived :

Breakdown by Google of Android devices in use by screen size. “Xlarge” is defined as any screen 7 inches or larger. By Google’s count, only 0.9% of activated in-use devices are tablets. Multiply that by the 135 million total Android “devices” that Larry Page announced last week during Google’s quarterly analyst call, and you get 1.21 million tablets. Compare that to the 28.73 million iPads Apple sold through the end of June. {Daring Fireball}

Isn’t that the sweetest little problem to solve? Now we know how useful elementary mathematics could be.

iPad has a leg up when it comes the OS which is discounted by the analysis. Yet Android tablets have a long way to go.

The reason for the lack of Android tablet sales could be attributed to the fact that Android wasn’t designed for Tablets until its Honeycomb version. Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer and Samsung Galaxy Tab (10-inch) are the only real Android tablets that are worth comparing with an iPad. Yet another reason is the lack of tablet specific apps for Android tablets. iPad’s app choice is brimming with a 100,000+ portfolio and there is no clear number on the number of apps which are tailor made for Android tablets.

Though Android has supreme hold in smartphone market, it needs more than few apps to make it large in the tablet world.