Reality of the current tablet market seen in traffic reports

I remain optimistic about the chances that another tablet other than the iPad will gain traction. There is no doubt that Amazon.com's Kindle Fire has a decent chance at success, for instance.

But one thing I still wonder is whether these smaller tablets will be used in quite the same way the iPad is. What I mean by that can be explained when you consider the web traffic generated by iPhone users versus Android users. For quite some time iPhones generated far more web traffic than Android devices, despite the fact that there were far more Android devices sold. The reason, many people reasoned (and I agree with), is that many low priced Android devices were replacing dumb phones – the buyer was not looking to surf the web with their device and so was using it far less for this activity.

(It should be pointed out that while Android phones account for more web traffic in the U.S. than the iPhone, when you look at iOS versus Android – that is, the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch together – iOS still is on top by a healthy amount. In addition, the only other country than the U.S. where Android phone web traffic is currently higher than iPhone web traffic is Argentina, according to comScore.)

So, I wonder, will the fact that most new Android driven tablets have 7-inch displays mean that their owners will use them for web surfing infrequently? We'll see.

For now, I know one thing, TNM's traffic from tablet users is dominated by the iPad: 96.7 percent of all traffic last month that was identified as coming from a tablet owner came from the iPad. The Motorola XOOM accounted less than one-half of one percent of all traffic coming from a tablet.