Apple and iOS to dominate tablets until 2015

Apple's iOS4.3 will dominate the tablet market until 2015, claims report.

Gartner has forecast that Apple will remain the dominant force in the media tablet market through until 2015.

Apple and its iOS4.3 platform will own 68.7 percent of the market in 2011, and whilst that number is forecast to diminish to 47 percent in 2015, Apple will continue to be at the top of the tablet tree.

Unsurprisingly, Android is set to be the main contender to iOS over the next five years with its all-important share figure forecast to rise from 20 percent in 2011 to 39 percent in 2015.

The introduction of the tablet-centric operating system Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) will attract more people to Google’s baby.

The next most popular operating system in 2015 will be QNX, the OS of choice of RIM, currently available on the BlackBerry PlayBook.

This is forecast to gain a share totalling 10 percent by 2015, in some part due to organisations choosing what they already know – business types love BlackBerry.

This is followed by the likes of WebOS and MeeGo.

Gartner explains that until MeeGo and WebOS can make a solid enough impact on the smartphone world, they will remain 'also-rans' in the tablet one.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, also gives some advice to tablet manufacturers by saying that impressive hardware like superfast processors isn’t the be all and end all.

Instead, more focus needs to be on “applications, services and overall user experience”.

Ms. Milanesi says that this is the best chance that other manufacturers have to compete with Apple.