Tablets Versus Smartphones For Screen View!

As internet users become increasingly mobile and each platform find its natural application across diverse disciplines and fields of human activity, the competition between smartphone, laptop and tablet pc continues to hot up. Which is best, which will last ?

Market analysts predict that tablet PCs are, ultimately, key to driving forward PC market growth by an estimated 14 per cent in the current year. Global sales of tablets are forecast to rise above 52 million, impacting upon sales of notebooks and netbooks. This means that for every ten tablets sold in 2011, five netbook or notebook sales will be lost.

The surge of tablet computers through the marketplace in last twelve months, which led to a significant take up of handheld computers, especially from the leading global brands, was always likely to affect laptop and netbook sale. According to some market survey, it is believed that the long-term trend will probably see laptop sales recover, while it will be the smartphone that will be most affected in the long-term.

A crucial factor will be user application for fixed functions. A handheld PC is lightweight, portable, and with a larger screen than a smartphone. Research shows nearly 40 per cent of users will go online for multi buy shopping as the tablet is considered to deliver a better experience compared to less than a third by smartphone users, and over a third of whom have not yet used their mobile for online shopping.

Studies already reveal that consumers are now mostly using their smartphones for its media and data capability, e.g. image and video sharing rather than as a traditional 'telephone' to make voice calls. By 2008 mobile users were already texting more than telephone calling. Between 2009 and 2010, smartphone data usage was found to have increased by 230 percent with just 3 percent for voice calls only and half used wifi on their phones to download data.

Consequently, user behaviour began to change as it was begun to be felt that they should no longer be restricted to a three-inch mobile screen, especially when a UMPC provides identical online and data/media access with a larger screen, and therefore, providing more detail. If the smartphone is essentially being used as a smaller ultra mobile tablet PC, then it follows that a tablet with an enlarged screen size would be better suited than smartphone for specific uses.

As a result of the key difference in an users screen experience, it is likely that consumers will eventually move away from the smaller of the two technologies. Despite of their otherwise almost identical functionality, its very probable that mobile shopping will split off in two directions within the retail sector. This could ultimately leave the smartphone to be used more for navigation, mobile payments and related code scanning while the tablet pc could takeover as the primary method for online search and an enhanced purchasing experience.