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If you’re a mobile app tester you really should consider expanding your hardware collection to include a tablet (if you haven’t already). In just a few short weeks tablet sales exploded – to the tune of a 9% ownership increase. From PCWorld:

The holidays were certainly prosperous for the tablet industry.

The number of U.S. tablet owners just about doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between the middle of December and the start of January, according to a Pew Internet report out today.

Coming from a period from flat growth since the summer, tablets enjoyed a surge during the holiday season as lower-cost devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablet reached shoppers just in the nick of time. …

Drilling down to the buyers themselves, tablets proved especially popular among households earning more than $75,000 and those with at least a college degree. A full 26 percent of those with incomes higher than $75,000 and 31 percent of those with higher levels of education now own a tablet. People under 50 were also a huge market for tablets.

Read the rest at PCWorld >>>

That 19% means 1 in 5 U.S. adults now own a tablet. On top of that, people aren’t just turning to loved ones and Santa for a tablet, they’re also hitting up their company’s IT department. From ReadWriteMobile:

Networking giant Cisco is attempting to quantify the enterprise market for tablets. So, the company spent the last several months of 2011 surveying 1,500 executives, middle management, salespeople and clerical staffs of medium to large business around the world. What they found that, on average, enterprise IT shops handle one tablet request for every three smartphone requests across the world. …

While Cisco touts these results as the rise of tablets in the enterprise, it seems there is still along way to go before large corporations are flexible enough to support the requests of their employees.

The United States and France have the highest request for tablets, at 21%. That charge is led by senior executives in the U.S., of which 38% of respondents were issued a tablet. Spain has the highest excitement about tablets with 90% of IT managers believing the tablet will be more popular in the next two years. …

The U.S. also expressed the most concern about tablets with 75% of IT managers saying that new rules must be established around security and device usage. IT managers also want to see restricted access to applications for all employees at 48% of all respondents.

The biggest want for IT managers was the ability to sync a tablet with an employee’s desktop at 71%. There are a variety of ways this can be done, either through VMWare or Citrix.

Check out the full article on ReadWriteMobile >>>

The demand is there on the consumer side, so we have to make sure we keep up on the app side and keep providing these new users with the best native and mobile web apps we can!