Even though demand for them has been falling a bit as of late, recent research shows that tablet computers are actually being used more and more in concert with other activities like watching TV, and that it’s not just teens and young adults who are using them all day long.
Research from Flurry Analytics, for example, shows that even though tablet usage during “prime-time” TV hours from 7 PM to 11 PM is increasing, usage during the rest of the day is increasing also, as more and more adults use their tablets at work.
Simon Khalaf, the CEO of Flurry, was surprised at the findings.
“This finding of iPad pervasiveness is not surprising for teens and college students,” he said. “However, we were quite surprised at the data on working adults — we expected significant let-up in tablet usage during work hours and heavier usage around traditional prime time.”
The data that Flurry found from usage of productivity apps was interesting as well. It showed that while teens and college students use their tablets in place of PCs when they wake up in the morning, during the mid-afternoon, and then later at night, most working adults use them primarily after prime-time has ended, and don’t use them to replace their PCs during work hours nearly as much.
According to Khalaf there are several factors to explain this trend including “the lack of a keyboard, IT not sanctioning the tablet as a corporate device and Microsoft not releasing Office on the iPad till about a month ago.” Still, he added that “we didn’t expect the generational gap to be so profound.”
One thing that Khalaf and his research team do expect is that, as teens and college students who were raised using laptops begin to enter the workforce en masse, productivity software developed and designed to be used specifically on tablets will also make its way to the market.
Tablet sales may be off slightly but their usage, it seems, keeps expanding at a healthy pace.