Tablets and smartphones are Used Mostly for Games, Study Confirms

Flurry Analytics recently posted a bunch of information on its blog relating to smartphone and tablet use. There are plenty of interesting facts, backed up by colourful graphs, telling us for example that there are more tablets owned by the over 55s than those between the age of 18 and 24, and that (surprise, surprise) tablet ownership is almost exactly equally split between women and men.

The most dramatic result discovered by the analysis, which looked at smart device use in September of this year, is the amount of time smartphone and tablet owners are spending on the various activities they're made for. For both smartphones and tablets, gaming won out by a large majority, taking up 39% of the owner's time with the former and a whopping 67% with the latter. Even 'entertainment', which I presume means music and movies, only counts for 9% of tablet use.

An important thing to note is that this analysis was based on time spent. So even if the average tablet owner only watches one one-and-a-half hour movie a month, and that counts for 9% of time spent on the tablet, that works out at more than eleven hours of gaming. If nothing else, that at least suggests that quick games to play at the bus stop are being replaced by games that are longer and more involved, a worrying prospect for makers of handheld consoles.