CES 2014: Research on UK tech gadgets and habits
What gadgets are we going to buy and how much time do we spend online?
CES is still undoubtedly the biggest tech show in town, and it’s in Las Vegas, which is a pretty serious town. The show isn’t until january but at this time of year, the people who organise CES come to our town in order to prep us on what is to come.
This year, they brought some research based around UK surveys that gives an insight as to how well-equipped UK households are in terms of tech and what we’ll all be buying in the next 12 months (primarily over Christmas of course).
Let’s start with what tech we’ve all got now, summarised in this slide below. It’s pretty incredible to see that smartphone ownership by household is approaching that of TVs. Tablets are lagging well behind at 43% but when you consider that tablet ownership pre-2010 was practically zero, that’s some impressive growth. Unsurprisingly the laptop, digital camera and games console round up the top four spots.
If we then look at what we’re planning to buy, as a nation, we can see that smartphones come top of the list, whether we already own one or not. Tablet computer sales look strong but we’re surprised to see that more people are planning to buy laptops than tablets, a result in this survey that goes against what we’d presume.
Finally we got some stats on internet use in the UK, where we apparently spend an average of 3.1 hours a day on the internet, more than most of our european neighbours. Internet use is now heavily biased towards smartphones, with us fitting in a quick browse to almost every aspect of our day, see below for the breakdown.
At CES this year we expect to see devices that make our connection to the internet even more continuous. Wearable tech is one big idea, with devices such as smart watches. We also expect to see more-and-more internet connected devices of all sorts, devices that lack interfaces of their own will become the norm, as our smartphones become our main way of controlling all the devices in our homes.
We’ll bring you all the big news from CES come January of course.
