Ad network Chitika decided to test whether Microsoft’s Surface – a tablet heavily promoted by its makers as the tablet best suited for doing “real work” – is actually being used more in work settings than either Apple’s iPad, or the various tablets that run Google’s Android OS.
To find out, they analyzed tens of millions of North American ad impressions between Jan. 20 and Feb. 2 and produced the pair of charts attached above and below.
Chitika found that during the peak hour for web usage in North America – 9PM Eastern – the iPad generates four times the traffic volume of all Android tablets combined, and it wipes the floor with the numbers produced by the Surface. (THis is shown in the top chart, where iPad=100% for relative usage share.)
Both the iPad’s and the Android tablets’ usage patterns differ no more than 6% hour-by-hour.
While Surface usage did drop off a bit more during work hours, just like the other tablets, their peak usage was around 9PM Eastern time, long after the work day had ended.
“Despite the usage statistics presumably indicating some success for Microsoft in this area,” the report concludes, “the company has a long way to go before challenging Apple or Google in terms of raw usage volume during working hours.”
