A recent report from Strategy Analytics noted “Android captured a record 39 percent share of global tablet shipments in Q4 2011, rising from 29 percent a year earlier. Global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 million units.” However, that 10.5 million number was reached by adding Amazon’s newly released Kindle Fire, which in our opinion is not an Android tablet.

Yes, Kindle Fire is based on Android OS, but its neither open as defined by Google, nor Amazon is part of Open Handset Alliance, a group of 84 companies including Google that have come together to accelerate Android development. Basically, Kindle Fire is a closed platform with its own Amazon Appstore and development of the platform is completely dependant on Amazon. For example, both Mac OS X and iOS are based on FreeBSD (a open source OS), but we don’t call those OSes open source or part of the FreeBSD group.

So, if we don’t include Kindle Fire in Android tablet market share, then what was the growth like for Android tablets? According to analyst Jordan Rohan, Kindle Fire shipment rose to 6 million units in Q4 2011 dominating the low-end tablet market. Now taking these 6 million Kindle Fire units out of 10.5 million Android tablets shipped, the number of Android tablet shipped in Q4 2011 drops to just 4.5 million, which is 16.7% of tablet market.

This basically means Android tablet market share dropped from 29% in Q4 2010 to 16.8% in Q4 2011. Even if, we consider lower Kindle Fire sales of about 4 million units as suggested by many analysts, we still see that Android tablet market share dropped by 5% to 24% in Q4 2011.

The numbers do look bad for Android tablet market, however they look worst if we consider that there were over 80 Android tablet models available from different manufacturers during past holiday season. And many of them were available on discount (priced below $300) to compete with the iPad.