PC Users Increasingly Turning to Smart Devices for Web Browsing, Facebook Access

February 11, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Digital | Mobile Phone | Social Media

NPD-Top-Activities-Shifted-PCs-to-Smart-Devices-Feb2013Almost 4 in 10 PC users are now accessing content on their tablets and smartphones instead of their PCs, per new survey data from the NPD Group. The top categories that are being shifted are web browsing and Facebook access: 27% of tablet and smartphone owners each say that they’re using their PC less often to browse the web, while 27% of tablet and 20% of smartphone users are migrating their Facebook time to their devices.

It’s not surprising to see that shift taking place for social networking. A recent GfK study found that consumer priorities on their smartphones and PCs differ significantly, with social media capturing 31% of smartphone internet time, compared to 18% of PC internet time. An earlier report from Prosper Mobile Insights suggested that 62.6% of smartphone and tablet owners who access Facebook prefer to do so via their smartphone (50%) or tablet (12.6%).

Despite the shift, these popular activities are still more often performed on PCs than tablets or smartphones, per the NPD results. For example, internet browsing is more common on PCs (75%) than smartphones (61%) and tablets (53%), and the same is true for Facebook access (63%, 55%, and 39%, respectively). And as the researchers also note, while these “entertainment-centric behaviors” might be migrating to smart devices, “computers will remain the fundamental content creation device in consumer’s took box for many years to come.”

The study also reveals that roughly 1 in 5 consumers with internet-connected TVs are using them to watch streaming video instead of their computer.

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