Apple’s iPad has been one of the best tablets out there, and also one of the best selling. Or should I say, the only best selling tablet? It would not be too incorrect I guess. Before the iPad, all we had were mini laptops with touch screen display that swiveled to make it a tablet. If you have used one of those convertible laptops, you would know how horrible the touch screen sensitivity was.

But iPad changed it all, it was the true tablet even though it was just a big iPhone without the phone part. The Apple iPad was sold in millions of units when it was launched. And that has never been false till now. Even today, if you take the stats of quarters, Apple is selling the tablet in millions of units.

In Q2 this year, there were a total of 7.5 million tablets sold in the North America. Any guesses how many of those 7.5 million tablets were the iPads? You would be amazed, but nearly 80% of those were iPads. Reports say approximately 6 million iPad units were sold in Q2 alone. Even all the Android, HP WebOS, and RIM PlayBook combined dint come anywhere near that figure.

This report comes from Strategy Analysis, as Boy Genius Report points out. SA analyst Alex Spektor says:

“Apple remains a long way ahead of its main rivals such as Motorola, Samsung, RIM, Asus and HTC. A combination of cool branding, user-friendly hardware, entertaining services and savvy retail distribution has made Apple a formidable market leader.”

Now that HP is getting out of the tablet market by dropping all its plans of the WebOS based TouchPad, and RIM seeming to take the same road with its dying PlayBook, all that remain are a few Android based tablets to compete the iPad. How do you think this will work out?