What you need to know
The growing availability of ultraportable and hybrid concepts at increasingly affordable prices, along with the launch of Windows 10 in July 2015, has contributed to stimulating consumer demand for laptops, which continue to be the most popular consumer technology product, in 82% of UK households as of December 2015.
Hybrid laptops and small form factor desktops seem to hold particular market potential. The former more than doubled in market share since June 2015 to reach 5% of laptop owners, while the latter only currently account for 2% of desktop owners, but are likely to soon appeal to a growing proportion of the population, particularly those who use their smartphones and tablets for most everyday tasks and only need a basic computer to turn to occasionally, when more complex and productive tasks are at hand.
Elsewhere, smartphones’ market penetration peaked at 79%, up by 3 percentage points in the three months to December 2015, as the device has gained an ever more central role in consumers’ daily routine thanks to improved software and bigger screens that allow for a wider and wider range of activities to be performed on it.
Meanwhile, digital wallets have slowly started to gain traction in the second half of 2015, with 12% of smartphone owners who signed up as of December, but an additional 32% interested in using the service. Nonetheless, only about half (7%) of those who signed up actually use the service, suggesting that there is scope to make digital wallets’ proposition more compelling to consumers.
Covered in this Report
This Report covers ownership of and intentions to purchase consumer technology products (eg televisions, laptops and smartphones), as well as which devices people have used to connect to the internet in the last three months.
We also look at what types of activities consumers have performed online using PCs (laptops or desktops), tablets and smartphones in the last quarter and analyse the factors that may be influencing ongoing trends in behaviour.
This edition of Digital Trends also provides an insight into consumers’ usage of and interest in using digital wallets (eg Apple Pay, Android Pay) and looks at their attitudes towards this mobile payment technology.
Finally, we take a look at how device ownership and methods used to access the internet compare across the five major European countries; France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
