Nielsen Survey on Connected Devices

I'm leaving today for Tucson where I'll be speaking at the Saguaro Romance Writers Chapter of the RWA on Saturday. Returning home Sunday and be back online Monday.

The Nielsen Company just issued their fourth State of the Media survey titled The Increasingly Connected Consumer: Connected Devices:

[They] recently surveyed more than 5,000 consumers who already own a tablet computer, eReader, netbook, media/games player, or smartphone to get a better sense of who is using these devices and how they are using them.

They began by identifying which connected devices the survey respondents owned. The survey indicates that, "Connected devices figures represent household penetration."

Not surprisingly, 25% of the respondents owned a smartphone. For the record Wikipedia defines a smartphone as:

... a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone ... we can consider a smartphone as a Personal Pocket Computer (PPC) with mobile phone functions ...

The breakdown of the respondents' connected devices:

• Smartphone 25%
• Portable game players 21%
• Portable media players 16%
• Netbooks 8%
• eBook readers 6%
• Tablet computers 4%

Many of the respondents own multiple connected devices with the tablet owners having the highest average number of devices at six.

The survey spent a lot of time looking at Apple's iPad. The iPad stats I found most interesting were those related to the type of content that the iPad users in the survey are accessing. News tops the list as the most accessed content at 44% with music following closely behind at 41%. I was encouraged that the iPad users put book content in third place at 39%. TV shows (33%) and movies (32%) were practically tied for fourth place.

Equally interesting was the amount of time the respondents say they spend on average in a weekday session reading books on their iPads:

• Less than 15 minutes per session: 22%
• Between 16 and 30 minutes per session: 32%
• Between 31 and 60 minutes per session: 24%
• One to two hours per session: 16%
• More than two hours per session: 7%

Nielsen also addressed the issue of paying for content versus downloading free (public domain) content.

Games came in at #1 as the top content purchased with 62% of iPad owners in the survey indicating they had purchased a game. I was pleased to see books at #2 with 54% of iPad users indicating they had purchased a book for the device. Music was in third place with 50%.

Nielson described their methology for the survey:

The Connected Devices Playbook surveyed more than 5,000 connected device owners who completed an online, self-administered survey in August 2010. The study tracked 54 different devices.

Go here to see the release information from Nielsen.

Go here to see a summary of the study's results.