For as similar as smartphones and tablets are, sharing operating systems, apps, and a good deal of their hardware, we don't use them all in the same manner. That's hardly surprising, as some tasks just lend themselves better to one form factor or the other; you might be more likely to watch Netflix on your tablet, just as you'd be more likely to run some UPC-scanning price-comparison app on your phone. How do those different usage patterns end up affecting mobile data consumption? One recent report claims some pretty big differences between how much data we use on tablets versus smartphones.

Bytemobile's in the video optimization business, working with carriers to help them deliver streaming video with a minimal impact on their networks. As such, it's interested in knowing just what kind of data-usage habits it's dealing with. Its latest quarterly report finds that tablet users suck-down three times as much data as smartphone users. This is only considering cellular data, ignoring the substantial chunk of tablet data that gets carried on home WiFi networks.

Part of the discrepancy is attributed to tablet users spending more time browsing the web, with individual sessions reportedly lasting longer, hitting more pages, and consuming 160% more data in the process.

Theses figures show changes from earlier studies which looked into similar behavior, where just last year tablet users seemed to be using twice as much data as smartphone owners, instead of the triple we're hearing now.

Have any readers with both tablets and smartphones taken the time to consider their own data consumption? Do Bytemobile's findings reflect your usage, or do you see something closer to an even split?

Source: Bytemobile

Via: Droid Dog