Cellphone Owners: We'll Use The iPad For Work

In a survey of mobile phone and smartphone owners, the most popular anticipated use for the iPad and other tablets was for work, followed closely by entertainment.Data analytics and management vendor Sybase commissioned the poll of nearly 2,500 adult mobile phone owners, 770 of whom owned smartphones. When asked what they would use a tablet device like the iPad for if they had one, slightly more than 52% answered "conducting work," while just over 48 percent said watching movies, video, or TV. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed were of the opinion that smartphones and tablets made workers more productive, compared with only 11 percent who felt the opposite. (The latter group may overlap strongly with the 12% who said they'd never purchase a device like the iPad.)

When asked about their current use of mobile devices, a little over 46% of standard cellphone owners and 79% of smartphone owners said they used them for both personal and work functions. Even so, the large majority had only meager access to their data: almost 60% said they could access less then 10% of their personal data, and nearly 70% said they could get at less than 10% of their work data. The scores were even lower for applications -- more than 70% said they could access less than 10% of their company's spreadsheets, CRM, email, and other applications. More than two-thirds felt they would be "more productive and better at my job" if they could double their access to data and apps, and the ability to interconnect with work systems was at the top of the wish list for mobile phone functions (tied with watching streaming video).

The study was carried out by Zogby International, drawing on that firm's online panel. More detail is available in this PDF summary.

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