Tablets rule the home-tech roost; ta-ta TV remotes: survey

By Michelle Maltais

May 2, 2012 12 AM PT

The TV remote might be feeling a bit neglected these days. It’s no longer what the family is wrestling over. Tablets are starting to rule the roost, according to a new survey.

Look just about anywhere online and there’s a story about the rise of tablets in our digital daily lives. This one from Yahoo gives a sort of room-by-room look at household usage habits. They surveyed 2,000 people in the U.S. between 18 and 64 years old.

Let’s start in the garage. Apparently 15% of those surveyed would ditch the car for a year to be able to keep their tablet. If only. That would make commuting so much easier for the rest of us.

In the living room, laptops are tops in tech that the family fights over, with tablets coming in second, pushing that remote control off to a lonely corner of the couch. The TV shouldn’t feel too comfortable, either. Apparently, almost 40% of the women said they’d tune out in preference for the tablet.

Now we head deeper into the home for a more intimate look at tablet penetration and usage.

When it comes to taking a bathroom break, a third of the men said they “frequently” had their tablet with them, mostly for messaging friends. (That’s probably a better alternative than talking on the phone.) Forty percent of the women said they never take take it to the powder room with them. Somehow, I suspect some of that that was just modesty talking. With all those people out there playing Words With Friends and Facebooking, you know that some of them must be on the throne somewhere.

This next kind of statistic always baffles me. Apparently, a quarter of the women surveyed said they would rather take a tablet instead of having sex. Tablets in place of sex, really? It’s not like it’s a Tylenol.

I’m with a bit more with the men here. Only 13% agreed to that strange scenario.

That said, most of them are taking them to bed. Overall, 91% said they use their tablets as the go-to device to help them wind down.
Maybe they haven’t seen that taking a hand-held device to bed can end up giving them more sleepless nights.

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