The World will spend a whopping $29.4 billion (Rs 1.35 lakh crore) this year on media tablets, a market where Apple had almost 90% marketshare last year, according to Gartner research agency.
The number is three times the equivalent figure for 2010, the researcher said in its latest prediction. Gartner had earlier predicted tough times for the notebook market due to the invasion of tablets, started off by Apple with its iPad two years ago.
Thanks to the tablet booster, total spending on computing hardware (excluding smartphones) would jump
9.5% this year to a total of $409 billion.
That, however, is only half the size of the $824 billion IT Services industry (support, monitoring, deployment etc) this year. Telecom will be about five times the size of computing hardware market too, at $2.1 trillion. Both will, however, grow only by around 5%.
Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.6 trillion in 2011, a 5.6 percent increase from $3.4 trillion in 2010, according to the latest outlook by Gartner.
Gartner has slightly raised its outlook for 2011 from its previous forecast of 5.1 percent growth. Gartner had underestimated the tablet revolution and issued a correction more than a month ago, lowering PC targets and hiking its tablet targets.