Students Prefer Smartphones and Laptops to Tablets, Study Finds

By Danya Perez-Hernandez. When tablets appeared on the market, there were expectations that they would be laptop computers’ greatest competition. That has not turned out to be true at Ball State University, where students see tablets as a form of entertainment—as essentially a bigger and more expensive smartphone, according to a recent study. The study, by Michael Hanley, a professor of advertising and director of Ball State’s Institute for Mobile Media Research, found that students’ use of smartphones for entertainment, such as watching videos, visiting social-media platforms, and shopping online, has increased in the last five years. More...