I had a chance to attend ipaddevcamp last weekend at the Paypal offices in San Jose.  Great event, some great keynotes, and some amazing people in attendance.

One of the speeches that really stood out for me was the one given by Flurry / Pinch media.  In short, Flurry (who merged with Pinch media this year) helps gather usage metrics for application developers.  As such, they’re swimming in data which shows how and what users are using their iPads and iPhones for.

Flury presented some pretty interesting usage metrics.  Most of it which aren’t that surprising.
– iPad sessions are on average 2~3X as long as those on the iPhone
– iPad game, video and book sessions are about 10X as long as those on the iPhone
– iPad book sessions average about an hour.  (I was a bit surprised it was that long)

One stat that was a bit of a surprise to me was that social app usage on the iPad was far less than on the iPhone.  They attributed this to the lack of social apps on the iPad.   But I have to disagree with this explanation.  I think social apps are all about quick interactions consuming or producing content. Quickly check twitter while you’re waiting in line.  Check into gowalla when you enter starbucks.  Look at your facebook stream while you’re waiting for the light to turn green, upload a photo to flickr that you just shot.  The iPhone is perfect for this type of quick consumption and generation of content.

So I think Steve Job’s was right that there’s a market for a device situated between the mobile device and your laptop.  It’s all about the hour you have to kill while sitting in the airport, sitting on the sofa as opposed to the 10 second interaction perfect for the iPhone and the 4 hours you have with you laptop.  The iPad has it’s flaws, but to me the tablet fills this hole perfectly … and Flurry’s analytics seem to reinforce this.

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