Gartner: Here Comes the Tablet Tsunami

With the iPad, Apple once again redefined a product category, and the result is one of Steve Jobs’s favorite words: Boom! According to a forecast released by Gartner today, worldwide sales of media tablets, led by the iPad, will reach 19.5 million units this year, and then jump 181 percent next year as more entries based on Google’s Android and other systems flood the market. By 2014, Gartner sees sales topping 208 million units. Some of those sales, however, will come at the expense of other portable computing and media devices, the report said.