Travelers Using Tablets for Content Consumption: Message to Developers?

By Karla Robinson
July 25, 2012

“Surveys of U.S. travelers confirm tablets are still all about about consumption of content,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “That has big implications for tablet makers and apps developers.”
One recent survey of 1,200 people conducted by Cloud Nine Media provides some insight into how people are using their tablets. Most importantly, content consumption remains dominant over creation, which challenges the notion of tablets as laptop killers and suggests possible areas for expansion.
“When asked what they do on the tablets themselves, the largest block (36.6 percent) of respondents said they were conducting online searches, followed very closely by checking e-mail (32.1 percent). Social network activity (13.3 percent), playing games (8.4 percent), and listening to music (4.1 percent) were the next favored activities,” explains the post.
Additionally, many respondents admitted to using their tablet just to kill time.
A related survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners also found only 21 percent of new iPad owners use their tablet for business.
“Those figures should serve as a signpost for tablet app developers as to what kinds of things most people are doing with their tablets,” the post says, adding that the business-oriented Microsoft Surface tablet, “may either kick open a door to a new opportunity, or crash into the reality that most people don’t really want to do serious work on a tablet.”

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