Brits who cannot live without their smartphones

According to new research, Blackberrys and iPhones have proven to be the leading smartphone devices in the UK.

The number of British using smartphones rose 10% in the last three months to almost 6.2 million, with Blackberrys becoming the fastest-growing smartphone.

The study by Nielsen also revealed that browsing the web was the fastest growing  UK mobile phone media activity between the second and third quarters of 2009. The number of users using mobile internet went up from 8.8 million in Q2 to 10.4 million in Q3. This means that over 1/5 of all UK mobile users access the internet via their smartphones.

The second fastest-growing activity was downloading applications with 3.1 million users in Q2 to 4.1 million in Q3- up one million new users. Email is the third one down from list, increasing from 5.1 million users in Q2 to 5.8 million. However, most significantly is the growth of text messages and sms alerts which totals 78% of all British mobile phone users who send/receive sms.

Although change was not utterly significant, it’s still surprising to see video listed as the top 6 fastest-growing mobile phone media activity with 4% of total mobile phone owners using their devices to watch videos.

Overall, the total number of people in the UK using smartphones increased 10% between Q2 and Q3 (5.6 million to 6.2 million) that’s over 577,000 new smartphone users.

Edward Kershaw, Vice President of Mobile Media, The Nielsen Company said: “Although there have been sizeable increases in the take-up of new mobile technologies such as video and location-based services they remain niche forms of behaviour. Although the era of the handset as a truly multi-media device on a mass-market level lies somewhere on the horizon, the key for companies to successfully harness mobile lies in a realistic understanding of what media activities people on a large-scale are actually doing on their handsets now.”

These figures clearly indicate that significant growth opportunities remain in this segment. It’d be interesting to see what the new launch of smartphones such as the Palm Pre will do to these numbers and of course, how these figures will have climbed once the holiday season is over.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.