The trend toward mass adoption of tablets is evident, based on new industry research that says 70 percent of mobile business cloud file sharing occurs on their Apple (News - Alert) iPads and iPhones.

The study, conducted by Egnyte, a provider of hybrid cloud file server products, revealed several findings on tablet and mobile phone usage based on the fourth quarter of 2011 that showed Apple continues to dominate the tablet arena.

iOS devices comprised 70 percent of overall usage, over double that of Android (News - Alert) based devices, which was 28 percent. According to Egnyte, two-thirds of iOS-based device use occurred during business hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.  

And it appears that with the proliferation of mobile devices, business users don’t necessarily go on vacation.

U.S. holiday data showed use over Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas remained consistent with regular non-holiday weekends. Thanksgiving day saw the highest tablet activity for a weekend at 2 percent of monthly usage. Non-holiday weekends ranged from a low of 1.2 percent of traffic to a high of 2.1 percent of traffic, Egnyte said.

In fact, the number of tablets in the enterprise has grown exponentially in a short period of time, according to Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte. Based on Egnyte’s user data, iPads and iPhones are the dominant tool to access the cloud, at nearly double the rate of Android.

“This is very likely caused by a dramatic increase in productivity applications and acceptance of the cloud in the enterprise,” Jain said in a blog post. “When combined, this trend will propel tablets to displace laptops as the device to use when on the go, whether for taking notes at an office meeting or for presentations in the field.”

The top five states that accessed Egnyte’s HybridCloud File Sharing service from a mobile device or tablet began with California at number one, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.

Since the birth of the tablet computers, the iPad has been the king of the market. While there have been many Android-based tablets that have tried to topple the king, there have been very few real challengers, TMCnet reported. While the iPad has seemed pretty strong at the top of the market, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has recently been released and there are some who feel like Amazon’s tablet could actually be the iPad killer industry insiders have been waiting on for so long.

Based on both consumer and business use, Android tablets comprised 39 percent of the world tablet market in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to recent research from Strategy Analytics – though as many as half of those were not running Google (News - Alert)-approved versions of the operating system, the researcher said.

Apple dominated the rest of the market on its own, taking 58 percent of the market during the period as it sold 15m iPads, more than double the number of the same period in 2011.

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