It’s been 6 months since the iPad was released; has it left a mark yet?
You won’t see everyone walking down the street with an iPad on an afternoon walk. However, there are a lot of impactful changes expected from the device and others of its kind.
If you think about it, six months isn’t really a long enough time frame for a piece of technological hardware to completely change an industry. It would be a bit unreasonable to think that way.
However, according to Bernstein Research, a group of Wall Street analysts, the iPad is experiencing the fastest adoption rate of any consumer electronic device ever. Figures from July have reported that 3.27 million iPads have been sold at that time.
Forecasters at the Harrison Group conducted a study and found that 13% of American consumers expressed interest in buying a tablet device between now and next September.
Other companies, including Intel, believe that the iPad will steer some consumers away from purchasing netbooks or laptop computers. Since the majority of Internet users are content consumers, and the iPad offers an intuitive, media-rich experience, that hypothesis may not be too far off.
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Some publishers have already created iPad apps. For magazine or email newsletter publishers, iPad apps may be perfect for enhancing niche content that they provide. The popularity of iPad apps for newspaper publishers, however, is still unsure, as only a few newspaper publishers have started to offer their own apps.
ABI Research is expecting tablet devices to reach “mass-market penetration” by 2013. With new research showing that the number of Internet users worldwide will exceed 2 billion by the end of 2010, or 30% of the world population, it’s not hard to imagine that reasonably priced, intuitive and multimedia content consuming products will appeal to a mass market.
In six months the iPad has already made a big impact, and is expected to continue doing so. More tablet devices will be released soon, so we shall see how that affects the market as well.
To discover more on this topic of the iPad and how it will impact content-based industry, check out a recent article from Mashable that highlights the device’s content consumption abilities, users’ responses to the device and how industries are using it currently.
