Smartphones vs. Tablets: Who Uses What and How?

By: Yasmine Syed

Approximately sixty-seven percent of American adults use some kind of mobile device, whether it be a smartphone or a tablet. But who are they exactly? It’s important to know, especially if you are serving up mobile ads.

In a nutshell, they’re the ideal target consumer. Mobile device users are more educated and earn higher incomes than their non-smartphone using counterparts. This revelation may prompt you to wonder if traditional print media advertising should be relegated to the ash heap, but a study conducted by the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute proves otherwise. The same consumers who use mobile devices also continue to utilize traditional print mediums like newspapers and magazines. Rather than replacing traditional media with digital, these consumers consume both.

Mobile devices are as diverse as their owners. For example, smartphone and iPad owners are predominately male, while e-readers and small tablet owners skew female. IPhone and Blackberry users tend to be more educated and earn higher incomes than Android users and earn, on average, $75,000 or more annually. In fact, a whopping 81.3% of mobile device users earn more than $75,000 per year while 55.5% of mobile device users have a 4-year or advanced degree. What’s even more interesting is that nearly the same percentage of mobile device users and non-mobile device users read print publications. This data suggests that digital media is not replacing traditional media; it is simply an extension of it.

So just how do individuals us their mobile devices? Most people take their smartphones everywhere and use them for task-related activities like sending text messages and reading and responding to email, while tablets are used for longer-term media consumption.

The following chart depicts tablet use:

Smartphones vs. Tablets: Who Uses What and How?

Because tablets are largely used for viewing richer content and enhancing leisure time, display ads do not perform as well on tablets as they do on smartphones.  Because smartphones are task related they are predominately used while traveling, in a store while shopping, in the car, and in a restaurant.

The following chart depicts smartphone use:

Smartphones vs. Tablets: Who Uses What and How?

When it comes to automotive advertising, the evidence supports the need for ads to be optimized for smartphone users. Given the fact that they have disposable income, they are ripe potential car-buying consumers.