Day: 3 July 2012

Before we look at the statistics, it’s as well to look at this locally first. A report from O2 in the UK came up with some fairly interesting numbers on the daily interaction of smartphones users and their devices. Actually, there was another article related to that suggesting the “smart” phone as a word is not redundant and that we should really replace it with “phone” – I’d also advocate that we give “Ahoy” another shot as the introductory greeting!

Let’s first take a look at the smartphone landscape in Ireland, or rather the estimates. ComReg keeps a track of whats they suggest are the number of smartphones in Ireland. The get this by knowing the total number of mobile subscriptions, knowing the number of 3G users (ability to consuming internet data) and then subtracting the “dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions” (aka Dongle users). From this they estimate that 44% (2,171,532) of all mobile subscriptions are for dedicated smartphone subscriptions.

So, over 2m sims in Ireland are for dedicated smartphones – if you dwell on that as a media owner you have be thinking about plan “b” – if you don’t already have one. But let’s not this time out.

So, what do these 2m people do with their phones? According to the O2 research they spend 127 minutes per day (just over two hours) using their devices for a variety of uses. Strangely, only 10% of that time is used for making and receiving calls!

Just shy of 25 minutes are used for browsing the internet and 18 minutes using the device for checking social networks.  It would be nice to see a breakdown of the first part – the 25 minutes on the net. I’d like to see the types of sites visited and estimated duration. I read some comscore research to suggest that of five EU countries they looked at in March, 76% of smartphone users access news websites never day.