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Exhibits in Oracle case show Google expected Android to take 33% of iPad market in 2011

In July 2010, Google executives expected their upcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb release to immediately result in a takeover of a third of the iPad market, according to an internal presentation outed during Oracle's infringement case against the search giant.

The presentation, as detailed in slides published by The Verge, indicated that Google expected its partners to sell 10 million Honeycomb tablets by the end of 2011.

Instead, Honeycomb tablets flopped right out of the gate and never recovered, not only dashing Google's plans for taking over the tablet market that Apple had created the previous year, but also severely delaying the development of Android on smartphones.

Big tablet plans for 2010

Google's presentation slide also indicates that it only expected half a million Android tablets to sell in 2010. The company asked its partners not to ship devices using the older Android 2.2 Froyo, but Samsung and a variety of others did anyway.

Against Google's advice, Samsung claimed to have shipped two million Galaxy Tabs by the end of 2010, but later admitted that these were really just pushed into the channel and actually sold poorly to consumers.

Apple sold 14.8 million iPads by the end of 2010, more than Morgan Stanley had predicted for the entire global market.

Bigger tablet plans for 2011

After launching Honeycomb however, Google hoped to see 10 million tablets sell in 2011 and 20 million in 2012. Google compared its sales figures against the tablet shipments predicted by Morgan Stanley, coming up with and implied 33 percent share in tablets for Android.

Due to a combination of blunders by both Google and its hardware producers, Honeycomb tablets not only failed to attract an audience but were poorly reviewed on the basis of high prices, unfinished software and hardware that didn't function as advertised.

At the end of Apple's second year of iPad sales, the company had sold 67 million units, 25 million more than Morgan Stanley had anticipated for the entire global market.

Google's Honeycomb launch partner Motorola failed to ship more than a couple hundred thousand each quarter, and other Android tablets fared even worse. The most popular Android-based tablets were sold by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but those devices used non-standard builds of the old Android 2.x release that Google didn't want hardware makers using for tablet products.

Android ads outperformed by Apple

Also revealed in the 2010 documents is the fact that Android was generating less than half of the advertising revenue for Google compared to Apple's iOS. Google noted that Android's advertising run rate was projected to reach $120 million annually, compared to the $281 million that it was earning from Apple's mobile platform.

Other figures from the Oracle trial have underlined the fact that Google has consistently earned far more from Apple's iOS than it has from its own Android platform. The company testified that across four years from 2008-2011, it earned less than $550 million from Android, less than half as much as it earned from Apple in a single year.