Apple’s iPad will continue to reign the swelling tablet market this year even though it already has several competitors from various computer and mobile-device companies, according to a report released by research firm Gartner.

Gartner said iPad, which is synonymous to the term “tablet,” sets the standards for what the device really is, thus, leaving a small room for alternatives.

The firm expects 70 million tablets to be sold within this year and about 108 million in 2012. The expected number is way beyond the 17.6 million tablet sales in 2011.

Google trails behind Apple in the second position. The firm said Google’s Android operating system is still insufficient to match up with Apple.

However, Gartner said Google’s shares will rise to 39 percent in 2015 from 20 percent this year while Apple’s shares will gradually drop to 47 percent from 69 percent.

Research in Motion’s Playbook tablet, which uses the new QNX platform, gets the third spot in the market this year with a 5.6 percent market shares, which Gartner believes will rise to 10 percent in 2015.

The firm said time and remarkable effort is required for RIM to obtain more customers and developers that will deliver a more innovative group of services and applications around QNX. Carolina Milanesi, Gartner analyst said this method will make a feasible alternative to Android or Apple.

Milanesi said organizations that will be interested in RIM’s new QNX-run tablet will consist of those who have RIM’s infrastructurre or those who have strict security requirements.

The clash of tablets appears to be on the rage these recently. But, if new figures are any indication, it probably means they are still warming up.

Apple Inc, the undisputed company leader in the industry, has sold more than 14 million iPads as of December. But, market shares dropped in the third quarter of 2010 from 95 percent to 75 percent the succeeding quarter, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics.

During the same period, shipments of Android-powered tablets increased from 2.3 percent to 21.6 percent. However, those figures on market-shares represent shipments from manufacturers to vendors, and not the sales to end-users.

To sum it all, more than 17 million tablets were shipped in the entire world in 2010. More than half of them or 9.7 million were included in the holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter.

Durring the fourth quarter, there were 2.1 millions shipments for Android tablet while only 300,000 devices equipped with other operating systems were shipped.

But, sales for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is now the most popular tablet that runs Android operating system, were not as high as the company had hoped for, the Wall Street Journal noted.

Samsung’s Lee Young-hee said in an earnings call on Friday that there were two million Tabs shipped by the manufacturer in South Korea, but only “a small number” were bought by consumers.

Still, Apple’s financial reports showed a decrease on iPad’s success in the last quarter of 2010, CNN noted. There were still 525,000 iPads left unsold than in the preceding quarter.