Tablets are the New PCs - or are they?

People building websites should be keeping a close eye on their analytics. Since sales of tablets are skyrocketing, any day now we'll be seeing a huge uptick in web traffic from tablets. Or will we?

The king of the tablets currently is undoubtably the iPad, with 95% percent of the tablet market. It currently holds the title of the fastest selling gadget of all time and - if counted as a PC - puts Apple as number one in PC sales. According to some sources Apple has sold 8.25 million iPads as of October. By comparison, in 2010 there are an estimated 220 million internet users in the United States.

If these numbers are accurate, we should be seeing iPad usage at around 3% of overall operating systems - but they are not. I've checked a wide spectrum of sites and found there's been approximately an 1% increase in iPad traffic since they debuted January 2010:

In this same time period, Mac OS (Macbooks, iMacs, & desktops) traffic has increased by almost 4%. So what's going on? The answer I believe lies in usage patterns, which still sees the majority of users spending more of their internet time on their personal computer. By inference, we can assuming that iPad users are spending more of their time reading books or interacting through apps - if they are using the gadgets at all.

That said, usage patterns can change. As more manufacturers start getting into the tablet market, we should keep a close eye on analytics. Just don't go betting the farm on tablet internet usage just yet.