Web tablets appear to be having a significant impact on the amount of time that many device owners spend on their other electronic gadgets, according to a Nielsen survey of tablet owners released Friday. When asked to quantify the extent to which they used other connected devices since purchasing a tablet, 32 percent of the respondents who also owned a desktop PC said they used their tethered computers less often and three percent said they no longer use their desktop machines at all.
What's more, those survey respondents who also owned a notebook said they either used their laptops less often (30 percent) or never (two percent) since acquiring a tablet. Whether this signals a long-term change in consumer buying habits is unclear. However, weak demand for consumer PCs was the biggest inhibitor of computer market growth in the first three months of 2011, according to Mika Kitagawa, a principal analyst at Gartner.
"With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device or simply held back from buying PCs," Kitagawa noted. "We're investigating whether this trend is likely to have a long-term effect on the PC market."
Weakening PC Demand
Gartner Vice President Carolina Milanesi predicted last October that the all-in-one nature of media tablets would result in the cannibalization of other consumer electronics devices such as e-readers, gaming devices, and media players. "Mini-notebooks will suffer from the strongest cannibalization threat as media-tablet average selling prices (ASPs) drop below $300 over the next two years," she said.
Indeed, shipments of mini-notebooks in the United States during the first three months of 2011 fell 50 percent in comparison with the same period last year, Kitagawa noted Friday. "I would say that the major decline [was] affected by the tablets hype," she said.
Gartner also predicted in October that low-end consumer notebooks would only marginally suffer from tablet cannibalization. Even in the enterprise space, the firm's analysts noted, the majority of knowledge workers cannot use media tablets to replace their notebooks.
"Because of the convenience factor for travel and an 'instant on' for quick lookup functions, many users are paying for the media tablets with their own money to use both for work and pleasure," Gartner's analysts said.
Declining E-Reader Use
Among the tablet owners who also owned an e-reader, 27 percent said they were using their e-reading devices less often or not at all -- the same percentage reported by those who also own a portable media player. What's more, 25 percent of the tablet owners who also own portable game consoles are using their dedicated gaming platforms less often -- if at all, Nielsen reported.
Around half of all tablet owners reported either sharing their devices with others (43 percent) or purchasing a tablet for use by another household member (eight percent), Nielsen reported Friday. Only 13 percent of smartphone owners reported using their handsets less or not at all after purchasing a tablet.
Likewise, Gartner said last October that it foresaw very limited potential for tablets to cannibalize smartphone sales. Still, the full impact of tablet use with respect to the smartphone segment may not be known until models featuring smaller tablet form factors become more prevalent.
"The majority of the impact will be from seven-inch media tablets on high-end smartphones, as it will be hard for a user to justify owning both when the differentiation in usage model is very limited," Gartner's analysts said.
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