You know those 10.5 million Android tablets that shipped in 2011? It looks like about a million of them came from Motorola. The smartphone and tablet maker reported its quarterly earnings this afternoon, and Motorola says it shipped a million tablets in 2011, including about 200 thousand tablets during the last quarter of the year.
Motorola was the first company to bring an Android 3.0 tablet to market when the Motorola XOOM launched in February. Motorola also introduced the Droid XYBOARD 8.2 and XYBOARD 10.1 tablets recently, but they didn’t go on sale until 2012, so it’s likely that Motorola’s shipment figure only covers the XOOM WiFi and XOOM 3G/4G tablets.
Other companies selling Android tablets in 2011 included Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba. Dell has since exited the Android tablet market… at least temporarily.
Few of those companies has had what you would call wild success in the market. But Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both seen strong sales since introducing inexpensive tablets running modified versions of the Android operating system in November.