Software Hamilton

Over the past year, since Xmas actually in 2010 when I got an Apple iPad, I’ve been very much following the rollout of this new hardware, the personal tablet for use at work. Not, as many others do, I’m guessing to surf or watch movies or listen to your own music playlist, but to actually “do” something in the business world.

Look at presi’s maybe, or a Word .docx or an Excel ss…you know, stuff we all do all day long on our PC….but instead now do on a tablet. And just in December last, I got a brand new RIM PlayBook which I now love and use daily butI guess, I’m very much wanting more…but let me explain.

First the tablet universe size is somewhat “muddy” when it comes to real verifiable numbers of units sold. The Apple iPad and iPad2 are somewhere up around 40 million units sold, if you can believe the latest estimates. The whole android using market is second, it appears but I can find no real numbers to quote…and the RIM Playbook is much less even after the big sell-off at Xmas 2011 and the resulting huge drop in pricing too in the last few weeks.

There is a very recent study tho, but the folks that I’ve blogged about before, the PEW Internet firm here, that offers up some interesting info on the tablet ownership numbers…

“The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets. In the e-book reader world, some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell well below $100…”

Note that this chart outlines same but shows that marked increase dramatically too — and that the table and eBook reader numbers are so dang close too!

This is very interesting…in that mobile growth is surging, the number of mobile apps is a growing percentage of same and yes, as the prices fall, the market penetration grows too….and in my world, that’s a tell-tale sign that any startup who is looking for a “baileywick” to play in, just might consider the mobile app channel!