As a digital executive, you know there is always something to get on top of. The mobile world is moving very fast with new form factors hitting the market. Have you looked at Phablets as a specific device to make sure you are mobile friendly?

During a recent Monetate-Forrester webinar on the topic, Thomas Husson, VP principal analyst, Forrester Research, illustrated that point with data from Forrester and Shop.org.

“The vast majority of retailers reported conversion rates on smartphones were around 1%, while conversion rates for tablets were 2.4%,” said Husson. “Clearly, smartphones are much lower in terms of conversion rates than tablets. So if you don’t optimize for both the mobile and tablet experience, you will face a challenge.”

For consumers, the “tweener” status is part of the appeal. For ecommerce businesses, it’s about to become a conundrum. That’s because, when it comes to conversion rates, the phablet’s significantly larger screen size does not translate to significantly higher conversion rates.

In fact, those shoppers taking advantage of larger screen real estate (anything larger than 5.3 inches) converted just .94% of the time—a rate that’s just .6% better than conversion rates on the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S (.88%), which feature one of the smaller screen sizes on the market and, when combined, account for more than 40% of all mobile commerce traffic. Source: Monetate.com

For the past few years now, smartphones and tablets have been among the most popular Christmas gifts around the world. Flurry Analytics examined data across more than 600,000 apps to determine which devices were particularly popular this holiday season. Since Christmas day typically sees the highest number of new device activations each year, it seems like a good metric to make out trends in consumer preferences.

According to Flurry’s data, Apple is the big winner this holiday season. Not only was the iPhone 6 the single most popular device under the Christmas tree, but Apple devices accounted for 51% of all new device activations between December 19 and 25. The iPhone 6+, Apple’s first venture into the phablet market, was also among the Top 5 devices and contributed to the jump in popularity that phablets saw this year.

Phablets accounted for 13 percent of new device activations this holiday season, up from 4 percent during the same period. The phablet’s surge in popularity seems to come at the expense of tablets, which saw their share of device activations crash from 17 percent in 2013 to just 11 percent in 2014. As smartphones are becoming larger and more powerful, tablet vendors are having more and more problems to convince consumers of the added value a tablet can provide.

via • Chart: Phablets See Jump in Popularity This Holiday Season | Statista.

Phablet Penetration

Who Owns a Phablet, Anyway?

According to Flurry, a mobile app advertising and analytics platform, phablet users over-index in five persona categories when compared to the average smartphone user:

• Business traveler (1.5X)
• Business professional (1.5X)
• Bookworms (2X)
• Entertainment enthusiasts (2.1X)
• Social influencers (2.5X)