iPad Market Share Slips, Still Remains On Top

The tablet market has been somewhat stagnant over past few months, but there are still some interesting developments that have formed. For starters, iPad market share is down to 39.6% from 58.2% a year ago, according to data from IDC. That's quite a drop, but Apple is still remains on top over Samsung, who controls 17.9% of the tablet market, which is up from 11.2% last year.

As for shipments during the last quarter, total tablets shipped during the three months was 49.2 million units globally, which is a huge increase from last year's quarterly shipments of 20.3 million. Apple makes up 19.5 million of those shipments, which is up from 11.8 million last year. Samsung shipped 8.8 million during the quarter, up from only 2.3 million during the same quarter last year.

However, ASUS made the biggest move by taking third place away from Amazon. The company shipped 2.7 million tablets this past quarter, while Amazon only shipped 1.8 million. This is mostly thanks to the raving popularity of the Nexus 7 that the company manufactured for Google. This resulted in a 267% increase in shipments for the company over the course of a year.

In fifth place is Microsoft, and thanks to their new Surface tablets, the company owns a 1.8% market share in tablets, and they shipped 900,000 units during the quarter. The Redmond-based company ended up knocking Barnes & Noble out of the top five, but they still have a lot of work to do if they want to move their way up the list.