Apple's iPad remains the tablet king with 67 percent of the global market, but Android is picking up steam, according to Friday stats from Strategy Analytics.
"Apple iOS remains the world's dominant tablet platform with the most established services ecosystem," Peter King, director of Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.
As Apple revealed in its earnings report this week, the company sold 11.12 iPads during the quarter, for a grand total of 40 million iPads and iPad 2s since their April 2010 debut. That was enough to nab a "healthy" 67 percent of the global tablet market, King said.
A September report from Strategy Analytics found that the iPad has 80 percent market share in the United States. Gartner recently said that the iPad will likely make up 73.4 percent of worldwide tablet sales in 2011.
Android's share, however, also grew—from 2 percent last year to 27 percent, driven by offerings like the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Acer Iconia. All eyes are now on the Amazon Kindle Fire, which one analyst estimated is the only real credible threat to the iPad.
"Amazon's strategy of minimizing its hardware price is set to ignite the entry-level tablet segment and attract more mass-market consumers," said Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics.
Microsoft and Research in Motion are in a distant third and fourth place, the firm found. Microsoft had a "niche" 2 percent of the market, and the "future release of Windows 8 cannot come quickly enough," Strategy Analytics said. RIM had 1 percent, and really needs its next-gen PlayBook 2.0 "to offer a much improved ecosystem for messaging and consumer apps if it wants to take off."
Google this week unveiled Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, which pulls together the best of the phone-centric Gingerbread and tablet-focused Honeycomb operating systems. It will show up first on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone, but Asus said at the AsiaD conference this week that its new Transformer 2 tablet will eventually get the updated Ice Cream Sandwich.
Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly ready to start production on the iPad 3.
