Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is still a market innovator and dominator according to a Perion survey published Wednesday morning. The report shows that a majority of iPad users claim it’s their preferred device for checking email when compared to PCs and smartphones.
Over 4,000 online respondents were polled for this set of statistics, with 66 percent of the respondent base self-identifying as women. This wide margin of users reported by the well-established app development company, a whopping 90 percent, said that using an email app on an Apple iPhone (AAPL) was either “very” or “extremely important.” Two-thirds of respondents claim to use an email app on an iPad at least three times daily.
These results are consistent with an ongoing and already observed trend that shows tablet devices as among the most used devices by consumers. One out of every four American adults owns one. There is, according to the survey, also an emerging market for tablet specific apps to handle email—as most tablet apps are merely copies of their desktop versions.
Other findings by this first of its kind survey show that women and men use email apps on tablets differently—they are more strongly satisfied by the process and more likely to send a reply. Men tend to mix business and pleasure more often by sending personal and professional communications at a rate of 52 percent.
Overall, 38 percent of respondents reported that they use the Apple iPad (AAPL) to answer business email and personal email—showing that other studies that cite an emerging demand for tablet devices in the workplace might be an accurate observation.
And it also seems that email is among the number of apps Apple Inc. (AAPL) gets right. In this survey, the firm beat out Gmail with a 41 percent rate of preference compared to Google’s 31 percent.
Perion clearly has a vested interest in these figures as Incredimail is a product they’ve developed and hope to market effectively, but these stats can be telling when it comes to market need for apps that handle the unique concerns that tablet users have when accessing email. According to the survey, many users just look and send few, if any quick replies—only a small percentage replies in length.
It’s clear that according to this information, visual design elements will likely take precedence over user input options as Perion continues to develop email clients for the tablet. That is unless it is determined to be a barrier to replying in subsequent research. According to a survey conducted two years ago by WDS Global, the number of consumers that buy smartphone apps based on design alone is low, just 10 percent, as price is a large factor in whether or not the customer commits to download.
Apple’s client is preferred because it works out of the box and comes standard with the device. That set of factors is probably the hardest to breach when considering user habituation and preference. Apple (AAPL) could, however, step up its game to make tablet email more innovative, if it so desired.
