Older Shoppers Prefer Tablets To 'Fiddly' Smartphones, Says N Brown

Online and catalogue giant N Brown says tablets are more popular with older shoppers who find smart phones too 'fiddly'.

Dara O'Malley, N Brown's head of mature consumers, told the Financial Times that smartphones were too small for many older shoppers to happily surf the internet. 'The beauty of the tablet is you can actually alter the size of the font,' he said.

N Brown targets both older and larger-sized customers and has shown more resilience than other retailers - and other former catalogue firms trying to switch to online - over the past decade.

Retailers are planning to blitz the tablet market this Christmas as their usage for internet shopping soars.

Britons have adopted internet shopping faster than most other European countries and online sales now represent about 12 percent of all shopping and growing at double digit rates.