Smartphone addiction has gripped more than a third of British adults and nearly two thirds of teenagers, according to a new Ofcom survey.
When asked about their smartphone use, 37 percent of adults and 60 percent of teens admitted they are ‘highly addicted’.
Email is the second most popular activity with 53 percent sending and receiving email from their mobile.
Twenty seven percent of British adults and 47 percent of teenagers now own a smartphone. 59 percent of users had acquired theirs over the past year.
According to Ofcom, smartphones are blurring the line between work and personal life.
Thirty percent of users say they regularly conduct personal calls during working hours, compared with 23 percent of regular mobile phone users. But, sadly, smartphone users are more likely to take part in work calls while on holiday or annual leave.
Seventy per cent admit to ever having done this with a quarter doing so regularly.
Ofcom’s Director of Research, James Thickett, said: “Ofcom’s 2011 Communications Market Report shows the influence that communications technology now has on our daily lives, and on the way we behave and communicate with each other.
“Our research into the use of smartphones, in particular, reveals how quickly people become reliant on new technology, to the point of feeling ‘addicted’.”
Teenagers are more likely to pay for apps while adults tend to take advantage of free ones. But only 47 percent of smartphone owning adults had ever downloaded an app.
Of paid for apps, games and music attract the most buyers from both groups.
Perhaps providing way too much information, the survey also reveals that 22 percent of adults and nearly 47 percent of teenage smartphone users admitted using or answering their handset in the bathroom or toilet (headine in the Sun: “I’m on the throne”).
But unsurprisingly teenagers are also more likely to use their smartphone in places they’ve been asked not to.
A recent report by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said that the UK would reach the tipping point at which at least half of all the UK’s mobile phones would be smartphones by June next year.
Worldwide, feature phones are still the most popular handsets, thanks mainly to developing and emerging markets where mobile internet is more costly and less common.
On the back of this, and for those markets, more and more manufacturers are producing low cost smartphone models costing £100 and under.
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Comment by email from Nick Wright, who is pleased the report namechecks his company, billmonitor: “Ofcom’s latest Communications Market Report presents a simultaneously awe-inspiring and humbling depiction of the present day mobile market.
"One moment we’re given to marvel at the fact that the communications landscape has changed so vastly as to be unrecognisable from what it was only a decade ago. The next, we are reminded that the industry revenue for communications in 2010 was the same as it was in 2000 – essentially proving the old adage that technology changes but the share of wallet for this sector stays the same.
"It’s equally humbling, as well as surprising, to realise that fixed line calling minutes still outnumber mobile minutes despite the fact fixed lines have been declining each year throughout the past decade, 93% of the UK has a mobile and 1 in 5 of us freely admits to being “addicted” to our mobiles – a number that reaches 37% for smartphone owners and over 60% for teens.
On the contract market, it’s fascinating to see the rapid growth of the contract market and equally sharp decline in pay-as-you-go customers. Almost half the market is now post-pay, whereas it was 41% only a year ago.
It’s worth highlighting that this growth in post-pay subscribers is only likely to accelerate as pre-pay handset subsidies get removed and call costs skyrocket for PAYG customers – which in itself was a response by the networks to Ofcom’s own regulation to lower mobile termination rates.
It’s no surprise the networks will be happy about this migration as post-pay customers are worth more than 3 times as much as PAYG customers, are more than twice as likely to own an expensive smartphone and much more likely to be lifetime customers. But subscribers themselves are also clearly benefiting from this migration with lower tariff costs, better customer service (ratings for satisfaction in mobile are at an all-time high and outrank all other communication services) and improved handsets.
Of course, as customers move to contracts, it becomes enormously important to choose well and use services like billmonitor to help make that choice. On average, customers on post-pay contracts spend almost £200 more than they need to for how they use their mobile. Due to the extended contract lengths that are now standard and the lower tariff flexibility during the minimum contract term, choosing the right contract first time could save customers on average £400 over the course of a 24-month contract.
Ofcom approached billmonitor asking for a number of data points to support and inform their argument that they could not source from anywhere else and we were happy to oblige. billmonitor is a mobile price comparison site based on analysis of customers' actual bills, which gives us unprecedented detail and accuracy in supplying this kind of data.
Although Ofcom have caveated the data we provided as potentially skewed, we ourselves have critically evaluated our own data with other publicly available information and alternative sources and have found it highly representative of the overall market.