By 2017, tablets will be owned by over one in eight people on Earth, and will be a “mainstay” device among consumers and businesses in developed nations according to research from Forrester.

Tablet PCs are already popular mass-market devices, but by 2017 there will be 905 million users worldwide, up from just 15 million users in 2010. In Europe, 42 per cent of online consumers will own one, compared to 60 per cent in the US and 25 per cent in the developing world.

Meanwhile, worldwide sales of tablets will rise from 122 million in 2012 to 381 million in 2017 – a compound annual growth rate of 25.6 per cent. An increasing proportion of this market will be made of existing tablet owners purchasing newer models.

Although the majority of tablets will continue to be bought by consumers, enterprise purchases will make up 18 per cent of sales in 2017, having risen every year as a percentage since the inception of the market.

Both company-issued and bring-your-own (BYO) tablets will become pervasive in workplaces in developed countries or dynamic regions of developing countries, and over the next few years employees will increasingly bear some or all of the cost, Forrester predicts.

They will also become increasingly important in certain industry sectors, such as healthcare, and among specific classes of workers who need to be able to access their business documents while on the move.