Tablet Market: You Can Have My iPad When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands

Hardly surprising. The iPad is dominating the tablet market like the Augustan-era Roman Empire.

The device continued to trounce all comers in the second quarter, with a full 80 percent of the North American tablet market, according to Strategy Analytics. Out of the 7.5 million tablets sold in the U.S. and Canada, six million were iPads. The remaining scraps were divvied up between Motorola, Research In Motion, Samsung and other would-be rivals.

A commanding lead, and clearly tough to follow, let alone match.

That said, Strategy Analytics believes Apple’s grip on the American tablet market will be “hard, but not impossible” to break. And if anyone is going to do that, it will be Amazon, which is expected to uncrate its new Kindle tablet today — less than three months before the holiday shopping season (my colleague Peter Kafka will be covering the event live).

“Provided the pricing, screen size and hardware design are right, Amazon can be one of the main challengers to Apple’s dominance,” says Strategy Analytics director Neil Mawston. “Like Apple, Amazon has a strong brand, compelling content, sophisticated billing systems and widespread distribution.”

Sure does, as I’ve written here before:

… Amazon’s got its work cut out for it. But it has also got a better set of tools than most to work with. The company’s tablet will almost certainly be built to tap in to media services like Kindle, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Cloud Player. It will likely be built to support its Cloud Drive storage offering, as well. If Amazon gets the UI and form factor right — and early reports suggest it may have — this could be a compelling piece of hardware and a true iPad rival. Remember, Amazon, like Apple, has not only a big storehouse of mobile content, but a massive base of registered, credit-card-holding, trusting users to sell it to.

And those are tremendous advantages, particularly in a market that has seen so many comers without them struggle or fail, sometimes miserably.

[Image credit: Appertunity]