The much heralded post-PC era may take quite a while to arrive, if new research from Nielsen is accurate. The report, presented today at the paidContent Mobile conference, shows that fewer than 5% of people in the US own a tablet.
By comparison, 36% of respondents in the Nielsen study said that they owned a smartphone, and 13% owned a media player. In addition to relatively low penetration levels, the tablet market is also growing more slowly than some other markets. The number of e-books owned, for example, tripled in the year between Q1 2010 and Q1 2011. The number of tablets owned increased by two-thirds in the same period.
The good news for Apple is that it controls 80% of the tablet market, though that will undoubtedly change over the next twelve months as competition increases and lower cost devices expand the market as a whole. Asda, for example, currently sells five tablets for less than £100.
Recent reports of significant drops in PC sales from the likes of HP and Acer have prompted many commentators, somewhat lazily, to declare the end of the PC, suggesting that it will be replaced by the tablet. Not so, according to Forrester Research analyst, Sarah Rotman. ‘Tablet cannibalization is only a minor contributor to soft PC sales,’ she said in a blog post. According to Forrester numbers, tablet owners are more likely to have bought a PC in the last two years (72%), than US consumers in general (59%).
The news for Apple and its competitors is better among those who already own a tablet. The Nielsen data showed that tablet owners are ‘quite receptive’ to advertising and that video, book, and magazine content is more often accessed on tablets than smartphones.
As paidContent points out, however, ‘These numbers could be a by-product of the fact that those using tablets today are early adopters, and therefore more keen, than the mass market. But if they hold up as the market grows, tablets could be the window to a new model of paid digital content.’
