Pew's 6 Year Top 7 Adult-Owned Gadgets Pumps Mobile
The analytics group Pew have done a study with a massive amount of people responding to one question: which gadgets do you own? Over the course of five years, 2006 up to 2012, their respondent gave a cross-section of gadget use which shows the amazing changes in adult (18 years of age or older) owners of gadgets over the past few years. The categories we've got here are cell phones, desktop computers, laptop computers, mp3 players, game consoles, e-book readers, and tablets – can you guess which one has the most clout?
It's the cell phone, of course, which holds the most vast amount of users amongst adults. As Pew did not separate cell phones and smartphones, there's basically no way we can know if this number is only because everyone on earth simply owns a cellular phone or if smartphone usage has simply blown the cell phone use up in the past couple of years. It's the mobile world though that makes this number the obvious winner, even when we can't see the numbers all the way up to 2012 with the rest of the gadgets on this list.
Unfortunately back in January of this year the study ended for tablets and e-book readers, everything else before that, with cell phone use being the last number at the end of the day. Be sure to note that these numbers don't add up to 100% when multiple devices line up on a single period, this of course because some adults own two or more devices at once. You'll notice though that the two categories to take a bit of a dive have been desktop computers and mp3 players – you can see it well before the most recent study, especially with desktop computers.
Laptops and mp3 players appeared very much to be on the rise back in 2006 through April of 2009, but when the smartphone revolution started up in a big way around 2009, mp3 players fell out of style – on the other hand, even at the start of 2011 nearly half of the respondents in this study owned mp3 players. Laptops have never been stronger, growing from 30% all the way up to a massive 57% in approximately 5 years.
Both e-book readers and tablet computers are on the list and do appear low, but at around 20% here in 2012 after just 2 years on the market total (after the iPad and original Galaxy Tab launched, we must assume is the general start point), we go from 2% for e-readers and 3% for tablets up to 19% here in that extremely short period. This growth rate is quicker than the biggest rise or drop on this list in that amount of time.
Have a peek at that list again and check the numbers. Glance in amazement that not only are most of these devices thriving, they're on the rise as well.
[via Pew]