Smartphones dominate Indian web use, tablets on the rise

Smartphones are clearly gaining serious traction in India. People in that country now spend far more time online using their smartphones than desktops or tablets.

That’s hardly surprising though. India was, after all, the first country where mobile internet access overtook desktop usage. Add in the much lower barrier to entry of smartphones and you can see why people in India spent an average of 247.6 minutes per day on their smartphone.

According to a survey conducted by mobile ad network inMobi and mobile marketing network Mobext (via eMarketer), that’s significantly longer than the 176.3 minutes on a PC and 136.3 minutes per day on a tablet.

For the most part, people in India are still using their time online for communication and entertainment, but they’re becoming increasingly comfortable with ecommerce and doing business online.

While the use of smart devices isn’t causing any panic among the country’s traditional media powers — newspapers and television are still incredibly dominant — they’re likely to start eroding into that dominance as they become more and more common.

The survey found that tablet users in particular were likely to swap out their old media habits. Just over 30% of tablet users said that they watched TV less after purchasing the device, compared with 27.4% of PC users and 21.9% of smartphone users.

The second-screen phenomenon is also taking off in the country in a big way. Forty one percent of tablet users reported using their devices while watching TV, compared with 34% of smartphone users and 36% of PC users.