"The perception is that tablets are proliferating and replacing traditional PC and laptop machines so we developed our research platform to isolate tablet usage stats," said StatCounter's Aodhan Cullen in prepared remarks. "In reality we found that tablet internet usage globally at less than 5 percent is still relatively small compared to desktop and mobile."
Not relevant to the discussion because the research was tailored to isolate tablets. Our discussion has been about SmartPhones notably how people are using them in place of their PC's.
You’re still missing the bigger point.
Smartphones are being used for voice communications, and for texting, and “some” media consumption, and for Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps some e-mail. When it comes to most internet type stuff, such as all of the stuff you can do with smartphones and tablets, and the other stuff, such are reading news and information, the PCs have the majority of the traffic. In fact, when it comes to my usage of my smartphone, I do as little as possible and just wait until I’m in front of a bigger screen; the tiny letters on a tiny screen are just too much for my eyes, and I hear the same from most people I know. Smartphones have a place in today’s world, but regular internet use does not make them preferred in any sense. Even viewing videos on the tiny screens is not conducive to having a nice experience.
The study I pointed to dealt mostly with tablets, but, one can only deduce that, if tablets with the bigger screens aren’t being used as much as people suspected, then the smartphones with the tinier screens would also not be doing so well. Smartphones will show a bigger slice than tablets for internet usage, but that’s only because they can be a lot easier to take anywhere, otherwise, they still can’t match PCs for internet usage.