Apple to stay ahead in tablet boom, Google to trail: Reports

Apple's iPad will continue to dominate the surging media tablet market for years, with Google playing catch-up, research firm Gartner said on Monday.

Gartner said it expects 70 million media tablets to be sold this year and 108 million in 2012, compared with just 17.6 million in 2010.

Apple's share of the market will gradually decline to 47 per cent in 2015 from 69 per cent this year, while Google's share will rise to 39 per cent from 20 per cent now.

Google's Android has stormed the smartphone market, where it will become the No 1 platform this year, and it has emerged as the only viable solution for tablet-makers who do not own their own operating system.

Research In Motion's QNX platform, used in its soon-to-be-launched PlayBook tablet, will take the No.3 position on the market this year, with a 5.6 per cent share. Gartner sees that rising to 10 per cent in 2015.

"It will take time and significant effort for RIM to attract developers and deliver a compelling ecosystem of applications and services around QNX to position it as a viable alternative to Apple or Android," Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said.

review: Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Almost eight years ago, Nokia attempted to merge a smartphone with a gaming console with the N-Gage . More recently, Sony Ericsson attempted to merge motion-sensing gaming with telephony in the Yari.

But these never did very well, so a certain amount of cynicism was inevitable when Sony Ericsson announced the Xperia Play - a smartphone that ran Android 2.3 with a slideout gamepad featuring controls similar to those seen on Sony's legendary PlayStation consoles.

It is admittedly difficult to be impressed when you see the Xperia Play. In this era of uber-sleek , subcentimetre width devices, the Xperia Play comes across as chunky (16mm thick) with rounded, oval edges rather than sharp ones.

The front is dominated by a 4-inch touchscreen, but the real star is the slide out gamepad, complete with direction keys (the triangle-square-circle-cross control buttons that are the trademark of PlayStation controllers), a touchpad, and buttons for menu, select and start. The volume rocker of the phone is unusually in the middle of the right side of the phone, a placement necessitated by the left and right gamepad buttons. The back is plastic and you'll see a 5MP camera with a flash.

But if the looks of the Xperia Play are about ordinary, its innards are not. The phone packs in a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, graphics based on the Adreno 205 GPU, 512 MB RAM, a 8GB memory card (memory expandable to 32 GB), and every connectivity option you can think of. And all of them perform very well too. Used just as a smartphone, the Xperia Play turns in a sterling performance - the large display, although a bit on the dim side, is great for browsing the Web and the specs allow Android to flex its mail and social networking muscle.