Have Canada’s Mobile Millennials Bid Farewell to PCs? PCs’ share of mobile millennials’ online time drops to 46%, but they still rule for many digital activities
Toronto, ON (June 12, 2015) – Time spent with desktop and laptop computers is falling fast among millennial mobile device users in Canada. App Promo, BrandSpark and Tapped Mobile surveyed consumers in Canada ages 18 to 29 who owned a smartphone or tablet, and in 2015, they reported spending 46% of their online time on PCs. That was the first time PCs’ share of total online time fell below half.
Just two years earlier, millennial mobile device users spent over 70% of all their online time with desktops and laptops. Mobile phones have more than doubled their share of the total since 2013.
What are millennials doing on mobile? Judging by which apps they reported using in November 2014, using Facebook (74%), checking the weather (67%), playing games (56%) and using maps (56%) are among the most common activities. In addition, 50% reported reading the news on their smartphones, and 51% said they watched videos on such devices.
Both of those activities were more commonly conducted on desktop or laptop computers, however. In fact, a range of digital media activities including reading blogs, watching movies and watching TV were still more common on PCs than tablets or smartphones.
Smartphones really shone when it came to communication and social media-related activities. More than three-quarters of millennial mobile device users in Canada used instant messaging on smartphones, while just 34% used the services on their computers. Social networking was 12 percentage points more common on smartphones than on PCs, and 24 percentage points more common on smartphones than on tablets. Photo-sharing was also typically more mobile.
eMarketer estimates that 20.3 million people in Canada, or 56.4% of the population, will use smartphones at least monthly this year. Just over 15 million will use a tablet.
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SOURCE: eMarketer
Tags: BrandSpark, eMarketer, Millennials, mobile
