51Degrees take a look at the latest Tablet trends
Sales of Tablet devices have been declining in recent years. According to an Article from Android Police, "Sales increases from companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Huawei have slowed this decline to 3.4%, or 37.9 million worldwide shipments".
51Degrees continue to add new tablets to our growing database on a daily basis and track whether or not a device used to access a website or app, was a tablet, phablet, smartphone, desktop or another device. In this article, we take a look at the most popular tablets globally and Apple's dominance in the tablet market.
How do we define a Tablet?
Tablet - ‘Indicates if the device is primarily advertised as a tablet, or if the device is primarily advertised as a phablet and has a screen size equal to or greater than 7 inches‘.
All our metadata which define our properties are available for reference in our property dictionary.
Tablet traffic trends
In Nov '16, the Telegraph reported that mobile web usage had finally overtaken desktop. Not that it was a massive surprise at the time, it was more of a question of when rather than ‘if’!
Fast forward a year and during the run-up to Christmas in Dec '17, our data showed that 59.83% of our clients' web traffic came from mobile devices, with 16.22% of that coming from tablets. While not a formidable figure compared to smartphones, it still represents a large enough share to show that brands and e-commerce sectors still need to respect that tablet usage is still present and they need granular device data to optimise their online content. Otherwise they will be providing a poor user experience on Tablets which is a huge problem since Tablets have higher conversion rates compared to mobile.
The top five tablets that are used globally all belong to Apple. Since the first iPad (WiFi only) was released in April 2010, Apple have certainly taken a stronghold in the market over the past eight years. The most popular tablet not made by Apple is Samsung's Galaxy Tab A.
Customise user experience
With consumers using so many varieties of portable connected devices including Smartphones, Watches and Tablets, simply deciding whether or not a handset is ‘mobile’ isn’t always enough. Our Premium and Enterprise data identifies thousands of mobile and tablet devices, offering the broadest range of properties that can be used to customise each user’s browsing experience. This means tablet users can receive a big-screen experience optimised for touch control - while mobile phones receive a site that’s tailored to a smaller screen. Without this level of customisation, the links on a conventional website could well be too small for a tablet user’s fingertips... yet a basic mobile-specific site won’t make full use of the tablet screen.
Try our User-Agent Tester on any device to see an example of the device details we can detect.