Smartphones and Tablets Sales Grow – All Others Drop

We love our hand held devices!

Pew Research Center: Many Own Smartphones, Not Ebook Readers

PC Magazine – “Smartphone ownership has been on the rise over the last few years, but you hardly need a survey to tell you that—just look at all of your friends and family members who plant their faces in their mobile devices at any given opportunity. (A fun game for the upcoming holiday season.)

What’s more interesting is just how some of the other big tech devices in the market have ebbed and flowed over the past few years. The Pew Research Center has a few figures: Most notably, that the once-popular e-reader is starting to fall on tougher times—probably because any tablet you can buy today can also serve as a pretty good digital book.

According to its figures, which the Pew Research Center generated by conducting a whole host of surveys over the past decade, just around 68 percent of all U.S. adults have a smartphone right now, which is up from an estimated 35 percent back in 2011. Only around 19 percent of today’s adults say they own any kind of e-reader, however—a bit of a drop from last year’s 32 percent. (Pew didn’t release detailed stats for exact years, so we can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison back to 2011.)

Tablets, on the other hand, have been on a steady increase since Pew started tracking them in 2010. According to Pew Research Center’s figures, just around 45 percent of all adults now own one.

Curiously, just around 40 percent of adults say they own an MP3 player, and that figure hasn’t really changed since 2008. One might assume that the growth of smartphones that also double as audio players would have made MP3 players fairly irrelevant, but that’s not the case—not according to Pew Research Center’s features, at least. However, MP3 player ownership is on a decline for younger demographics. Only 51 percent of those aged 18–29 say they own an MP3 player now, versus 75 percent in 2010.

Our suggestion might have some merit, as smartphone ownership has jumped from 52 percent in 2011 to 86 percent in 2015 among this younger group. As for other devices, game console ownership has dropped from 62 percent in 2010 to 56 percent today, and e-readers went from 5 percent to 27 percent in 2012, but have dropped back down to just 18 percent in 2015.

‘The Pew Research Center surveys cover ownership of seven types of devices. The center studies them because their use often affects how people connect with each other, with information and with media. They also impact the way people spend their time. And each kind of device has its own attributes of how people use them and engage with the material they provide,’ reads the Pew Research Center’s report.

‘Thus, device usage has notable social and cultural implications, and there are sometimes important political and macroeconomic consequences to the way people use their gadgets. For instance, every major media industry – those built around video, audio and text – has been disrupted by these devices.'”