If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times.

The only tablet worth dicking around with is the Apple iPad.

The solid sales numbers for the iPad and dismal record of the Android tablets bears us out.

Time and again, we’ve seen prominent Android tablet vendors like Motorola, Blackberry, Samsung, Sony etc reduce their prices to better compete with Apple but to no avail.

Here’s one more piece of evidence that drives home our point that the only tablet worth buying is the iPad.

A new study by ABI Research has estimated that iPad users cumulatively downloaded three billion applications compared to 440 million downloads for all the Android tablets combined.

App downloads is perhaps the best indicator of a tablet’s popularity for what’s a tablet without apps – a mere paperweight.

By most accounts, the user experience of iPad owners is superior and that of the woebegone Android tablet owners inferior.

iPad – 3 Billion App Downloads

According to ABI Research’s practice director for mobile services Dan Shey:

Android is currently being used on many low end tablets that do not offer experiences anywhere near the iPad and this dampens the download momentum for users.

Apple offers 140,000 apps developed specifically for the iPad. In additions, tens of thousands of apps developed for the iPhone also work on the iPad.

We doubt there are even a few thousand dedicated Android tablet apps.

iPad downloads account for 19% of all app downloads on Apple devices including the iPhone, iPod touch and Mac.

From our own experience, there are tons of apps for the iPad including Indian TV channels like NDTV, newspapers like Times of India and Economic Times, books, Netflix, magazines (New Yorker) etc that keep us hooked to the device.

Recently a new app called Shahrukh Khan debuted on the iPad. No kidding.

SearchIndia.com does not share ABI Research’s enthusiasm that things will change as Android tablet vendors adopt the recently-released Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich and accelerate product development to close up the specifications gap between their tablets, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and the iPad.

By the way, did we hear someone say What about Aakash? 😉

  Android Tablets, iPad, Tablet