The Most Popular Tablet Use? Gaming!

It might come as a surprise to some (it does me), but according to a Google-conducted survey which queried 1,430 people, the most popular use for a tablet is gaming. In fact, a staggering 84% of those people claim to be tablet gamers, with other popular activities including ‘Searching for information’, at 78%, and ‘E-mailing’ at 74%.

The fact that gaming on a tablet is popular isn’t what surprises me, but the stark 84% result does. Also surprising is the fact that e-mailing is a regular task done by 74% of the people queried… e-mailing… on a TABLET? Alright, I admit that I am the kind of person who hates tapping away on a smart phone and generally typing ever without a keyboard. I don’t think I’m like most other people.

Gaming is something that Apple touts when talking about the iPad, but even more so, the company tends to focus on things like reading the news, creating media, and of course, watching movies. Interestingly, those activities pale in comparison to the aforementioned ones. Reading the news does garner a rather high 61%, but things like eBook reading and shopping resulted in 46% and 42%, respectively.

Now, to be fair, that’s still half of the users asked, which amounts to a good number overall, but even so. If I had to guess, I would have expected ‘Accessing a social network’ to see a far higher number than 56% (I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it at least on par with ‘Searching for information’).

Going further, Google reports that 68% of tablet users claim to use their respective tablet each day, with 38% using it for more than 2. Perhaps proving that tablets are more for home use than business use, 82% of people primarily use their tablets at home, with 11% using them on the go, and 7% using them at work. It wouldn’t surprise me if these numbers skewed a bit in the future, if the adoption of the tablet in the workplace does indeed occur on a large scale.

For even more stats, you can review the 133KB PDF that Google has put together here (Right-click, save as).

With more than 165 million tablets expected to ship over the next two years, tablets are growing in popularity and changing the way that we consume content. People are spending considerable time with tablet devices and using them to play games, browse the web and search for information. Growth in the tablet market is only accelerating with companies releasing new products, and media companies and developers creating content specifically for these new devices.