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Tablet sales have been forecast by Gartner Inc. to increase by almost 100 percent from 2011 to 2012. The rise in sales will largely be due to Apple's new iPad, which will lead the tablet market for the next four years.

The survey, conducted by Gartner Inc, predicted that global customers would buy 118.9 million tablets including the iPad in 2012, a whopping 98% increase from 2011. iOS continues to dominate the tablet market and is projected to take 61.4 percent of worldwide tablet sales. The dominance is despite Microsoft pushing Windows 8 to tablets later this year and the anticipated international launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire.

"Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market ... we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad ... vendors struggled to compete on price and differentiate enough on ... the hardware or ecosystem," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. She added that the new iPad has reset the benchmark for rival tablet manufacturers.

Gartner also said that the lack of tablet announcements at CES this year was because manufacturers are waiting for Windows 8 to launch, hoping the Microsoft brand will help companies to sell.

Worldwide media tablet sales to end users for iOS are projected to rise from 39.99 million in 2011 to 72.98 million this year. In 2013 the rate of sales is expected to slow slightly, to 99.55 million. By 2016, Apple will have sold 169.65 million units of iPad.

Microsoft tablets will account for 4.1 percent of media tablet sales this year, growing to 11.8 percent by the end of 2016. "IT departments will see Windows 8 as the opportunity to deploy tablets on an OS that is familiar to them ... we see Windows 8 as a strong IT-supplied offering more so than an OS with strong consumer appeal," Gartner added.

The research also said enterprise sales of media tablets will make up 35 percent of total tablet sales in 2015, with more consumers owning tablets that are used at work.

Android tablets are forecast to make up 31.9 percent of media tablet sales in 2012. The analysts said the lack of tablet-specific apps for Android is the biggest issue.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)

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