77% of consumers who own a tablet computer use a tablet or a smartphone to shop, according to a new survey of 402 tablet owners from comparison shopping engine PriceGrabber.

Of consumers who use their mobile devices for shopping, 40% say they engage in mobile commerce a couple of times a month, 23% once a week, 20% a few times a year, and 10% daily, and 7% less frequently than a couple of times a month, the survey finds.

84% of tablet owners have downloaded apps onto their tablets or smartphones, the survey says. On average, these consumers have 39 apps on their mobile devices, seven of them related to shopping.

“Consumers are becoming savvier and approaching mobile shopping from every angle by downloading not just one, but a variety of shopping-related apps that can offer them everything from price drops to bar code scanning to coupons,” says Graham Jones, general manager of PriceGrabber, which offers its own smartphone and iPad apps. “We expect mobile shopping to be game-changing as consumers increasingly enact various strategies to find the best prices and retailers inevitably expand their mobile presence.”

The survey also delved into the ballyhooed iPad 3, which will go on sale March 16. 52% of the tablet owners in the survey own an iPad 1 or an iPad 2. 42% of iPad owners planned to purchase the iPad 3, the survey finds, 39% before the end of 2012, 30% within the first year of release, 20% within the first month of release and 11% within the first week of release.

Features most important to tablet owners who plan to buy an iPad 3 include: better battery life, 53%; better camera, 44%; better processor, 44%; high-definition display, 24%, and other, 9%.