WP Central

Two weeks back Mobile Nations ran a survey asking all of you to tell us a few things about your computing and mobile device ownership and buying plans.  I’ve been digging into the data which is especially pertinent given today's iPad announcement.

Admittedly, those of us who fill out these surveys in the first 48 hours are often the most enthusiastic tech people of the bunch.  So we can’t go too crazy drawing conclusions.  But still, the data is interesting.

We had just over 1100 Windows Phone users fill out the survey.  The percentage of those people who use a Mac versus a PC is quite small, at only 5.1%

Across the entire survey population (over 7500 results), Mac has 17.7% market share. Without doing the math, this sure looks like a statistically significant result to me.

This may not be too shocking of a result to many of you, but I think we can safely say that Windows Phone users dislike Macs more than the average person.  A lot more.

The goal of the survey was to understand tablet adoption plans.  And it seems that Windows Phone users are slow to adopt tablets versus the rest of the Mobile Nations crows.  Let’s look at the data.

Most Windows Phone owners who filled out our survey do not own a tablet (54.1%).  Compare this to only 21.8% of iPhone users who don’t own a tablet.  What about Android users?  Only 32.6% of those surveyed do not own a tablet.  Even WebOS owners who filled out our survey have massively adopted tablets with only 15.4% not owning one.

Or how about 13.7% of BlackBerry owners who don’t own a tablet?  Although this metric is probably skewed from the free Playbook giveaways that have been commonplace at BlackBerry Devcon and BlackBerry World conferences.

Why have Windows Phone users been so seemingly slow to buy tablets?  I think it comes down to brand loyalty and product availability.  Without going through all the numbers (perhaps something for another article), the data tells us that users tend to buy a tablet that matches the OS of their dominant phone.  So Windows Phone users appear to be waiting for Windows 8 tablets to hit the stores. 

In fact, 85.3% of Windows Phone users in our survey plan to buy a tablet this year.  And a whopping 91.8% of that crowd intends to buy one that runs Windows 8

I’ll admit to having been negative on the future of Microsoft in the mobile world.  But this survey data (all the data, not just what I covered here) has convinced me that Microsoft remains a very important player.  They’ve still got more momentum than I gave them credit for.

Cheers to brand loyalty.

(Chris Umiastowski is a contributing writer to the Mobile Nation network. You can see the rest of his posts here at AndroidCentral, iMore and Crackberry.)