'Honeycomb' Uptake Shows Less Share Than 'Cupcake'

If you want a graphic view of how poorly Android tablets are selling, look no further than Google's own graph of Android version distribution. The company occasionally updates a dashboard that breaks down the "market share" of all known versions of Android, and the latest one shows that most folks are running 2.2, as we would have expected, but also that Android 3.x, meaning Honeycomb tablets, have almost no uptake.

Android 2.2 or Froyo is present on 59.4 percent of handsets. Meanwhile, 2.3 is on 18.6 percent of handsets, and 2.1 is still on 17.6 percent of handsets. The sad news is that Android 3.x, meaning Honeycomb based tablets like the LG G-Slate and Motorola Xoom is only on 0.9 percent of devices, total, while Android 1.5 is on 1.4 percent of devices and 1.6 is on 2.2 percent of devices.

That means that there are more people running the two-year old and ancient Android 1.5 or "Cupcake" than are running Android tablets.  Can you hear the thud around the flops that are, at least so far, Android tablets?

Also, the fact that many of those who are running 2.2 still haven't received a 2.3 update is another sign of the "fragmentation" problem that Google hopes to solve. Earlier this year, Google squeezed a promise out of its OEMs, such that they would guarantee that their devices would work with the latest version of Android software for at least 18 months after a hardware launch.