Early last year, none of us really knew how the tablet would fit into our daily lives; following the iPad’s launch in April 2010, a lot of cynics and naysayers predicted that it could be short-lived.  As opposed to the extrapolations, the Apple’s iPad managed to stand $9.6 billion-strong, making proud strides in roughly a year. Following the success of the iPad and seeing such great opportunity in the tablet niche, a lot of other companies started popping out their own tablet versions.  Because of the emergence of these competitors and the proliferation of tablets in the market, the tablet war is expected to become a bumpy ride, and Strategy Analytics have it that the tablet market could surge to as much as $49 billion by 2015.

The tablet bridges the gap between smartphones and laptops. “The strategic trend here is for personal and mobile computing to shift away from keyboards to touchscreens,” says Neil Mawston, a Strategy Analytics analyst. “Competition is rising, supply is rising, so prices should fall over time.” North America, Asia Pacific and Western Europe will account for the largest tablet consumption. With the exception of personal computers and television, tablets could surpass all other electronic devices in terms of sales.

As the competition gets tougher, Apple iOS, the operating system which runs the iPhone and iPad, is expected decline from its current 69 percent market share to 47 percent by 2015. “At least for the next couple of years, you can assume Apple will be the leader,” he says. “This is going to be a fast-growing market and there’s going to be a lot of announcements over the next one-to-two years, but very few of them are actually going to survive in the long run.” It’s even possible that the market could bite a larger chunk than just $49 billion provided that the devices will be more on content creation than consumption, says Strategy Analyst Abhey Lamba.

Further highlighting Apple’s lead, a recent comScore MobiLens report says that the iOS, which power the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is currently outpacing Android by 54 percent, taking into account all of these OSes devices. Apple has a combine platform reach of 37.9 million.

“comScore is excited to announce the availability of connected device data as part of the comScore MobiLens service,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “This new data set enables us to not only understand the comprehensive ecosystem of mobile and connected media device users, but it also allows us insight into their detailed demographic and behavioral attributes.”

Other tablet-centric developments lately involve HP TouchPad’s due this June for $499, as well as launching a movie and music service for it. BlackBerry, on the other hand, hopes that the Playbook tablet will return RIM to glory after losing so much to competitors. It’s also pretty nerve-racking for BlackBerry to be preferred by the White House and business all over the world, but not by tech savvy people.  Ouch! Also, Toshiba’s also getting into the competition with a tablet that’s going to be called “Thrive.”