Tuesday 31 July 2012

Tablet research - Nexus 7 trails iPad by a large margin for awareness & excitement

The latest Harris Buzz report is available, the 17th edition - click here to download the free report.

As always, we look at 13 new releases and technology/media/entertainment news stories in July, including Andy Murray's sobbing exit from Wimbledon, measuring awareness, discussion and excitement on a nationally representative GB Harris Poll sample.

We also covered the Nexus 7, the first tablet from Google, a 7 inch device made by Asus. For me, this is the most interesting story because we can compare its Buzz with that of all three iPads. We always test at time of   launch, so all the results are comparable.

What do we see for the Nexus 7? Let's take a look at awareness and excitement.


For familiarity we see Apple's products topping the list with the last two iterations building on the media frenzy of the first. Nexus 7 is the most recent tablet and its level of awareness is more comparable to that seen for Galaxy Tab, Playbook and Touchpad. I've put the date of the fieldwork (when we measured awareness) on each bar to be absolutely clear how these are benchmarked. Apple's lead (from iPad 2) is not quite double that of Nexus 7, but it's not far off that mark.
Now let's look at excitement. Below you'll see the iPad reigning supreme, well ahead of the rest. Nexus 7 is again roughly on par with the Galaxy Tab.

What does it mean for Google and Nexus? And for any tablet maker other than Apple for that matter? Well, Apple's grip on the market has been firm, and it remains so. We shouldn't take this, in any way, that the Nexus 7 is a failure. It's not. It's been critically acclaimed and it's sold out. But these graphs do show what a steep hill Apple competitors have to climb to gain the attention of the public and the mainstream tablet buyer.

And this data also shows that it is the iPad that retains the most excitement when people think about tablets. There's something about the iPad that generates a buzz that other manufacturers are yet to match.

All the Buzz reports from which this data is mined can be found here.

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