Monday, January 23, 2012

Tablet ownership doubled over Christmas

US Tablet ownership doubled over the 2011 holiday season, article.

Surely the Kindle Fire is responsible for a lot of that, with a million sold per week, but it's generally agreed that the iPad is still holding its top of the hill position. And of course they are hardly interchangeable. [Update: Apple says they sold 15M iPads in the holiday quarter.)

But anyhoo, from zero to 19 percent in two years... And from 10 to 19 percent in two months!  That's gotta be the fastest adoption rate of a new technology ever.
Oh, and by the way, according to other studies, the number one use of the Kindle Fire is: reading! I admit I would have hesitated to guess this. I think this is a good score for abstract thinking version sensual "thinking".

I am interested to see how reading will look in a mere ten years. What with thinner, lighter, cheaper ereaders, small and hopefully some bigger too for graphics-rich reading, and probably no turn of the rising trend of printing and distribution costs of paper publications, surely tablets and readers will by then have taken over a huge lump of reading duties in developed countries. And then (or well before), like with mobile phones, it may go even faster in less-developed countries, due to poor traditional infrastructure.



2 comments:

Stephen A said...

a.) We are in the CD-ROM/MySpace phase of interactive content. Everybody wants to throw everything at the screen possible. In time things will settle down.

b.) What is really interesting is when multiple tablets become commonplace. MultiTablet apps are really going to be interesting.

c.) Two big phase transitions: The tablet is becoming commonplace and the tablet is becoming cheap. This is the equivalent of the transition between the Swiss mechanical watch and the Japanese quartz watch, or the fountain pen to the ballpoint. Things get really interesting when the tablet is a medium as opposed to an object in itself.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

A and C, very good points.

B, not sure I understand. Apart from games, what do you expect from MultiTablet apps?