These are good times for tablet vendors.

Ahem, only if your company’s name is Apple. 😉

Worldwide media tablet shipments shot up a whopping 88.9% on a sequential basis and 303.8% year over year in the second quarter of 2011 to 13.6 million units, according to market researcher IDC.

Consumers eager embrace of its iPad 2 tablets in the second quarter boosted Apple’s market share to 68.3% from 65.7% in the previous quarter.

Apple shipped 9.3 million iPad 2 tablets in the second quarter.

Apple Owns 68% of Tablet Market

How are Other Tablet Vendors Doing?

Well, if we were the top executives at RIM (Blackberry), Samsung, Motorola, Asus or any of the other tablet vendors we’d write our will, confess our failures, bid goodbye to the family, take the elevator to the roof and splash our brains into a red gooey patch on the sidewalk. 🙁

Virtually every Tablet vendor except Apple is struggling to move its gadgets out of the stores.

Now, do not be fooled by vendors declaring their impressive sounding tablet shipment numbers because that’s not the important metric to go by. That’s merely what they ship to stores.

What matters is sell-through, in other words the number of units that have been sold to consumers. Except Apple, you won’t find any other tablet vendors sharing the sell-through figures because they’re embarrassingly, disgracefully low.

Android Tablets Slipping

These are not good times for tablet vendors running Google’s Android software.

IDC’s number-crunchers say that Apple’s strength and Research in Motion’s entrance were ill-tidings in Q2 for Android-based media tablets, whose collective share slipped to 26.8%, from 34.0% in the previous quarter.

RIM’s PlayBook, which entered the media tablet market in 2Q11, garnered 4.9% share of the market. Well, we’re surprised at that figure. Who’d have thought there were so many schmucks in the world to buy a tablet that makes it hard to even get your e-mail.

IDC expects Android shares to fall further in the third quarter (to 23%) before picking up in the fourth quarter (to 25.9%).

Not surprisingly, HP’s discontinued TouchPad is estimated to have taken a 4.7% market share in the third quarter. After all, HP slashed prices to $99 to get rid of unsold inventory gathering dust in the stores. But this is a temporary rise and by the first quarter of next year IDC expects the WebOS market share to shrink back to zero.

“Apple’s iOS share will continue to lead by more than 40 percentage points over Google’s Android for the remainder of the year, but we expect Apple’s share to fall closer to 50% by the end of the forecast period as manufacturers bring new tablets to market,” said IDC analyst Jennifer Song.

More Tablet Sales in 2nd Half

IDC boosted its total tablet shipment forecast for 2011 to 62.5 million units, up from a previous projection of 53.5 million units based on strong performance in the second quarter and an improved outlook for the second half of the year.

With the Sony S tablet (based on Android software) releasing tomorrow in the U.S., it’d be interesting to see what impact it’ll have on the Tablet market in general and on Apple’s share of the total pie in particular.

  Tablets