According to a report which has been released by a major UK telecom operator named Ofcom, almost a third of the country’s adult population consists of smartphone users. The iPhone from Apple is said to be the most popular brand whereas teenagers were seen to be more favorable towards RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones. The report has established that the increased sales of smartphones have resulted in mobile internet usage increasing dramatically.
Facebook came out on top in the list of the most visited websites on mobile devices with people spending around 43 million hours on the social network last December. The Communications Market Report released annually by Ofcom combines the research conducted by the regulator itself along with the work of a number of analysts.
The document which spreads to 341 pages provides an extensive insight into the consumption of internet, radio, TV and telecom services in the UK. Concerning cell phone usage, the report stated that 58% of the smartphone users were found to be male. This trend was reversed in the teenagers who were surveyed, as 52% of smartphone users came out to be girls and the remaining 48% were boys.
Even as the Apple iPhone was the device favored by 32% of the country’s adults, the phone’s popularity went down among teenagers as 37% of them preferred BlackBerry to it. Most of the smartphone users who participated in the Ofcom survey considered themselves to be addicted to their smartphones, which is a worrying trend.
The study by Ofcom also surveyed how people use internet over their smartphones, analyzing the internet usage of 2,481 adult users who accessed it on their mobiles. The users voted receiving and sending emails as the most popular task in this respect. A large number of users also performed online banking operations on their phones.
A minor percentage of the users were concerned with privacy while online, with concern growing with the increase in the age of the uses as only 6% of those surveyed who were between the ages of 16 and 24 years expressed privacy concerns whereas the percentage grew to 13% among those between 55 and 64 years of age. There was a sharp decline in the visitors of news websites on mobile handsets, as the sites registered a 33% decrease in the viewership.
