If you are surfing the Web from a mobile device these days, odds are you are doing it not from a smartphone, but from some type of tablet. According to a study done by Adobe, for the first time tablets have surpassed smartphones for percentage of website views.
Adobe analyzed more than 1 billion visits for more than 1,000 websites and found that 8% of traffic came from tablets. That ranks ahead of the 7% of visits that came from smartphones. Of course, that leaves 85% or so percent of Web traffic still coming from desktop PCs and laptops.
The tablet number is significant because there are far, far fewer tablets in circulation in the world compared to the vast proliferation of smartphones.
Adobe attributes tablets increased Web usage compared to smartphones to users preferance for “more in depth visits” with their tablets. Adobe says that page views and visits are 1.7-times higher on tablets than on smartphones.
Adobe notes that all the regions it tracks tablet traffic saw total traffic double in the last year. The United Kingdom has the highest percentage of tablet traffic, with 12.2% of views, while China had the lowest at 3.1%.
From an entirely mobile perspective, there are two ways to look at these numbers. Just six years after the launch of the first iPhone (July, the essential start of The Mobile Revolution) and three years since the launch of the iPad, smart mobile devices now garner nearly one out of every six website pageviews. That is not insignificant. On the flip side, though, no matter how much we harp on the notion that the mobile Web is not just the future, but also the present, the vast majority of Web traffic still comes from the legacy that is the PC.