Tablet Market in future will outstrip PCs & reach 900million people

When unveiling the first iPad in January 2010, Steve Jobs suggested that it would fill a gap between the smartphone and the PC - one that at the time was being taken on by netbooks. "The problem is netbooks aren'tbetter at anything," Jobs said at the time. "They're just cheap laptops. And we don't think they're a third category of device."

Now, netbooks are dead, and Forrester Research says that Jobs was right - and that the tablet format has become the "third form" of computing, along with the other two. The tablet, it suggests, has become like a microwave in a kitchen: a mainstay device that people expect access to both at home and work.

Forrester's new report, which the Guardian has seen, suggests tablets will become a mainstay of households in developed markets by 2017, with 60% of online consumers in North America and 42% in European owning one by 2017. By then 905 million people worldwide, equivalent to one in eight of the global population, will have one, predicts Forrester Research.

The figures compare with PCs, which took over 20 years to pass the 1bn installed base mark in 2008. Another research group, Gartner, reckons the installed base will reach 1.5bn by the end of this year, but sales are dwindling amid lengthening replacement cycles and growing consumer interest in tablets and smartphones.

Taking off with the tablets

By contrast the tablet market is enjoying rocketing growth. New figures from a separate research business IDC show that in the second quarter of 2013 worldwide tablet shipments rose by 60% year-on-year to 45.1m, even while the three top-line vendors Apple, Samsung and Asus all saw a sequential drop in sales. Apple also saw year-on-year sales drop in the absence of a refreshed version of its iPad. And while Apple was the single largest vendor, with 32.5% of the market, Google's Android took over the majority share with 62.6%.

Forrester's analysis points to tablets becoming an essential part of office as well as home life, which will "catapult the tablet from merely a popular mass-market device to a highly visible mainstay device among consumers and businesses in developed nations."