Strategy Analytics finds millions of Q88 Android Tablet-Priceangels.com

One problem in factually verifying Apple's true market share standing in the Q88 Android Tablet industry is that, of all the tablet manufacturers on the planet, only Apple's iPad actually reports its unit sales. That fact makes it much easier for market research companies to estimate numbers of competing shipments with variable degrees of accuracy and with zero accountability.

IDC hasn't reported its Q2 tablet figures yet, but for the quarter ending March 2013, it said the industry sold a total of 49.2 million tablets. Apple reported selling 19.5 million, more than the rest of IDC's top five (Samsung, Asus, Amazon and Microsoft) combined. But that wasn't enough to account for more than 40% of the tablet market, IDC reported, because "Other" had sold a whopping 15.5 million tablets.

Curiously, for the same Q1 2013, Digitimes Research reported just two buckets of tablets: iPad and "non-iPad." While it agreed with IDC on the number of tablets that Apple sold, it reported that the rest of the industry only sold 12.4 million, 2.3 million fewer than IDC counted among just the top five, even before wondering who the "Other" was selling those 15.5 million IDC tablets without a readily recognizable name attached to them.

In total, Digitimes counted 17.8 million fewer tablets than IDC. That's nearly as many doppelgänger tablets as Apple sold worldwide. That's way too large of a difference to be attributed to a rounding error. At least one of these firms is completely not even close to providing useful quarterly tablet numbers.dssS2SAAa

Next up, look at Strategy Analytics, which reported "global branded tablet" shipments of 40.6 million in Q1. Once again, the only number it reported in common with IDC and Digitimes is Apple's 19.5 million iPads.

Strategy Analytics reported 3 million tablets running Windows, while IDC said Microsoft alone had shipped 0.9 million and that "total combined Windows 8 and Windows RT shipments across all vendors reached 1.8 million," a difference of 1.2 million, or just 40 percent of Strategy Analytics' figure for Windows tablets.

Given that there isn't much going on outside of iPad, Android and Windows in the 8 inch android tablet space, IDC's remainder of 27.9 non-iPad, non-Windows tablets is in even greater discrepancy with Strategy Analytics, which counted 18.1 million branded tablets fitting that description. That's 9.8 million non-Windows, non-iPad devices that have gone missing, quite nearly half the number IDC counted. On the other hand, Strategy Analytics is also 8.7 million tablets in excess of Digitimes.

Being off by around nine million units in either direction is a pretty vast error. That's the total number of PCs Dell sold in the quarter. At least two of these market research companies are not even close to reporting the actual numbers for tablets sold in the industry. It is insulting to intelligence that these numbers are so obviously garbage, yet are recited as established fact by any journalist who gets the press release in their inbox. The tablet industry is clearly full of phony information, whether by intent or incompetence.