Titbit: Some smartphone statistics

I guess depending on your age you may or may not find the following statistics about smartphones marginally depressing.

Note that the following relates specifically to smartphones and not mobile phones in general.

• The average person checks their smartphone 150 times a day (about once every 6.5 minutes).
• The average iOS and Android smartphone user has downloaded and installed 41 apps.
• Of these 41 only 2.2 are paid for (the rest are ‘free’).
• The average Windows Phone user has downloaded 7 apps (because most of what you need is built into Windows 8 Phone).
• 1.3 million new Android devices (smartphone and SIM-enabled tablets) are activated every day.
• The above means that in every 24 hour period 400 percent more new smartphones and tablets are set up than there are babies born.
• The average smartphone user spends about 1.2 hours per day browsing the Web from their smartphone.
• With iOS and Android users, of apps downloaded, one in four are abandoned/uninstalled after the first use.
• Over the last 12 months gaming on phones and tablets has become the single most popular activity accounting for 43 percent of battery usage.
• Social networking comes second accounting for 26 percent of battery usage.
• By the end of 2013 it is estimated there will be 1.82 billion active smartphones in use globally.
• Australia has the second highest smartphone penetration in the world with 37 percent of the population owning a smartphone.
• Singapore has the highest penetration with 62 percent of the population owning a smartphone.
• By comparison, the USA which is sixth, has 35 percent penetration.
• Two out of five people use their smartphones while watching television.
• Three out five use there smartphones while eating a meal in company.
• 80 percent of smartphone owners will check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up.
• For 60 percent of smartphone owners their smartphone is the first thing they will pick up on waking.
• Smartphone usage is the number one cause of ‘distracted driving’ motor vehicle incidents. Eating/drinking while driving is number two. Using a navigation system is number three. Distracted by passengers is number four.
• The Android smartphone operating system developed by Google now accounts for over 53 percent of the smartphone market.
• Apples’ iOS is less than half the Android share at around 23 percent.
• E-mail is the number one application downloaded for use on smartphones [I found this interesting. I though e-mail was a dead technology?].
• More e-mail is read via mobile devices than using a desktop client or via webmail [I wonder if this factors in businesses?].
• 82 percent of smartphone users use their smartphone for reading and sending e-mails [Not me! I don’t have any e-mail configured on my smartphone].
• Just under one third of smartphone owners purchased their first smartphone in the last 16 months.
• Only 12 percent of smartphone owners have had a smartphone for five years of more.
• 51 percent of smartphone owners are aged 12 – 34.
• Less then a fifth of smartphone owners use voice commands regularly [which could be because they really just don’t work that well … yet].
• Smartphone owners upgrade their phones more frequently than feature phone owners. Feature phone owners have an upgrade cycle of 3.1 years. The average upgrade cycle for smartphone users is 22 months (just under two years).

I collected these statistics from various sites. I often found statistics on one site that were different to those on the site I was referencing.

The problem with a lot of these kinds of statistics is that there is no crisp way to arrive at a perfect outcome so the organisations doing them have to average, flatten, weight, and adjust—hence there are differences between the various statistic collections. But the idea is to get a general view rather than to have razor sharp numbers.