About one in 10 Canadian tablet owners now considers their mobile device to be their primary computer, suggests a new online survey conducted globally. The research by Ipsos also suggests Canadians may be a little less enamoured with their tablets than users worldwide.
When averaging out the responses collected in 24 countries, almost 20% of tablet owners said they counted on that device to do most of their computing, compared to 11% of tablet owners in Canada.
About 41% of tablet users in Saudi Arabia, 38% in China and 30% in India preferred using a tablet over a desktop or laptop computer.
Among Canadians, women, those under 35 years old, and consumers in the Prairies and Quebec were most likely to consider their tablet their main computer.
The Canadian results are based on polls with 1,000 adults in January.
The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
According to another study released earlier this year, tablet ownership is spiking in Canada.
A report by the Media Technology Monitor suggested 28% of anglophone Canadians owned a tablet as of last fall, up from 12% a year earlier.
About 60% of those tablet owners had an iPad and almost 20% had an Android device.
That report was based on surveys of 4,001 anglophones between Oct. 3 and Nov. 24, 2012 and is considered accurate within plus or minus 1.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
