RIM Playbook Predicted To Lose Tablet Race

Gartner has predicted that Research in Motion’s Playbook, running its bespoke QNX operating system, will struggle against its Android and iOS brethren in the next five years.

So said the analyst house in its new forecast, “Media Tablets by Open Operating System: 2010 to 215”, which looks at which tablet operating systems will rule the roost for the foreseeable future. Gartner predicted that “Apple’s iOS will continue to own the majority of the worldwide media tablet through 2015.”

QNX Squeezed

Thanks to the success of the iPad, Gartner predicts iOS will account for 69 percent of media tablet OSs in 2011, but by 2015 its market share will decline to 47 percent.

Apple’s main competition will come from Android based rivals, with Android predicted to have a 19.9 percent tablet market share figure in 2011, rising to 38.6 percent in 2015. Gartner also thinks that WebOS will have a 3 percent market share in 2015, whereas MeeGo will have a 1 percent market share.

But perhaps the most surprising prediction is the poor showing for Research in Motion, which will soon enter the tablet market with its Playbook device.

Gartner predicts that QNX, the bespoke operating system used by the Playbook will achieve only a 5.6 percent market share in 2011, which will rise to 10 percent in 2015, well behind the likes of Android and iOS.

Gartner did say however that RIM’s decision to migrate all Blackberry devices to QNX in 2012, will allow it to offer users a consistent experience across its whole product portfolio and create a single developer community. But despite the fact that Gartner recognises QNX as “a strong platform that delivers on performance, graphics and multitasking features,” it unfortunately will suffer as it lacks a sufficiently ricks apps ecosystem.

Developer Disadvantage

“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. This will limit RIM’s market share growth over the forecast period,” said Carolina Milanesi, research VP at Gartner.

“It will be mainly organisations that will be interested in RIM’s tablets because they either already have RIM’s infrastructure deployed or have stringent security requirements,” she added.

Late last month however, RIM announced that it would release two “app players” that PlayBook users can download, so they can install any of 25,000 BlackBerry Java apps and some 200,000 Android apps from BlackBerry App World on the BlackBerry tablet.

Gartner felt that platforms such as MeeGo and WebOS, which currently have a weak presence in the smartphone market, “will have a limited appeal unless they can grow that business.”

“Smartphone users will want to buy a tablet that runs the same operating system as their smartphone. This is so that they can share applications across devices as well as for the sense of familiarity the user interfaces will bring,” Milanesi said. “Vendors developing on Android should be prepared to see more cross brand ownership as some users might put OS over brand when it comes to the purchasing decision. Improvements on usability and brand recognition are the strongest differentiators they can focus on.”

Apps Ecosystem

Gartner’s overriding message however is that it not just about the hardware, but rather the ecosystem that goes with it, that will decide who dominates the tablet market. Indeed, it strongly warned Apple’s competitors about being sucked into hardware-based oneupmanship which misses the point: namely it is now all about the apps.

“Seeing the response from both consumers and enterprises to the iPad, many vendors are trying to compete by first delivering on hardware and then trying to leverage the platform ecosystem,” said Milanesi.

“Many, however, are making the same mistake that was made in the first response wave to the iPhone, as they are prioritising hardware features over applications, services and overall user experience. Tablets will be much more dependent on the latter than smartphones have been, and the sooner vendors realize that the better chance they have to compete head-to-head with Apple,”  Milanesi added.