Even if Microsoft's Surface tablet got the blame for the New England Patriot's loss in the AFC championship game, it looks like the company is still winning in the tablet market.
Regardless of the Surface's football flop, tablets have stopped selling like hot cakes for the past year anyway. Nonetheless, Microsoft is winning more market share at the loss of its competitors such as Apple.
According to market analysts Strategy Analytics, the global tablet market fell by as much as 8 percent in 2015, and as a result was "its worst year-on-year performance ever."
Surprisingly, the tablet is a clear winner in the Windows ecosystem. Though the numbers do show that tablet shipments are shrinking, the number of Windows tablets being moved is inversely increasing. To be exact, Strategy Analytics' report reveals that while the tablet market stumped an all-time low, Windows-based tablets grew by as much as 59 percent year-on-year.
Windows competitors - tablets based on iOS and Android mobile operating system - dropped 22 percent and 7 percent, respectively. The biggest loser here obviously is Apple.
Despite the release of the iPad Pro, it seems as if the rest of the buying public decided to purchase iPhones instead of huge tablets from Apple. Besides making the iPad Pro plainly bigger and offering with it the Apple Pencil (even though Steve Jobs heavily ridiculed the use of a stylus with the iPad), the company also focused more on its MacBooks, iPhones, and Apple Watch instead.
For Windows, the clear winners have been those crossover tablets that offered both the functionality of a tablet and a laptop combined into one. These 2-in-1 devices actually increased in shipments at a healthy 379 percent year-on-year growth in 2015.
"2-in-1 Detachable Tablets have reached an inflection point in 2015 as computing needs continue to trend more and more mobile and Tablets with Windows 10 can compete against iOS in the premium and high price bands and equally well against Android in the mid and lower price bands.," stated senior analyst at Tablet & Touchscreen Strategies, Eric Smith.
