As popular as Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets are, it seems that customers who use the tablets are not often using them to browse the web.

Onswipe, a company that specializes in creating touch-screen experiences for the web, today released the results of a new study that looked at what tablet devices people were using to access their websites. The unsurprising result is that the iPad is the tablet most people were using. What is unexpected is the scale of the iPad’s dominance: the device accounted for 98.1% of Onswipe’s unique impressions.

The study looked at Onswipe’s web data from September 13th to September 20th. The company announced on its blog that the data covered 29.5 million unique impressions from 1200 different sites. “The iPad is clearly a browsing device,” said Jason Baptiste, Onswipe CEO.

The runners-up for web-browsing tablets are the Samsung Galaxy Tab with 1.53%, the Motorola Xoom with .21%, the Amazon Kindle Fire with .11%, and the Asus Tablets (presumably the Nexus 7) with .06%.

So, if the iPad is for web browsing, what are people using the other tablets for? One thing to consider is the sheer number of iPads that have been sold. Apple set the standard for the tablet industry the same way it did with smartphones, and iPad sales outnumber other tablets by millions. Still, that alone might not account for such a dominant representation on the above graph.

Another possibility is that smaller tablets, such as the Galaxy Tab, the Kindle Fire, and the Nexus 7, are being used for the consumption of content other than the web. Amazon, in particular, has created its Kindle Fire tablets to be perfect at pushing content (books, streaming video, apps) straight from Amazon’s ecosystem.

It also has to be considered that Onswipe’s websites might appeal more to iPad users for some reason. With 1200 websites and 29 million impressions included in the study, though, it probably gives a good overview of tablet web browsing as of this year.

(via Apple Insider; Image courtesy Onswipe)