Tablet market to triple in 2011, say memory men

Led by the Apple iPad tablets seem set to become a big big business in 2011, with flash memory shipments set to triple as a result, according to iSuppli.

The analysts predict 1.7 billion Gigabytes of flash memory for tablet devices will ship next year — that’s up 296.1 percent from the 428million GB used this year. At the current trajectory, the analysts think we’ll see 8.8 billion GB used by 2014. (and with an unscientific half a gigabyte of memory inside each tablet that equates to billions of tablet sales).

“Tablets have stolen some cachet from netbooks,” said Michael Yang, senior analyst for memory and storage at iSuppli, pointing out that the iPad has “wowed consumers with their responsiveness and media interaction-due in part to the use of NAND flash for data storage, instead of a traditional hard disk drive.”

With competition set to intensify as competitors intorduce their own flash-based tablet pretenders this season — hopefully at lower prices than the Samsung tab — the tablet market will only grow.

“Average density of NAND flash for tablets will reach 28GB in 2010. By 2014, average NAND flash memory density for the devices will reach 65GB.”