UK Users Lead In Mobile Data Usage In Europe; TV Least Popular Service: Survey

More stats on mobile usage from the researchers at Universal McCann. In the third part of their survey of 10,000 mobile phone users worldwide, mobile data usage collectively outweighs voice usage in the most mobile-advanced countries, but comparing them as individual services — SMS, MMS, mobile Internet versus voice — the latter is still used most frequently, with 41 percent of users making at least five calls a day on average.

Music is the number-one content people would be willing to pay for, and the number-one kind of content people are demanding on their handsets; but in general paid-for downloads lag way behind other ways of getting music onto a phone. Some 38 percent of users have ripped CDs onto a phone; 36 percent have used music on their phones acquired through P2P illegal downloads, with China the most popular country for such services. Only 16 percent of users worldwide have ever downloaded paid-for content.

Mobile features. SMS is the most popular service on phones with usage hitting nearly 100 percent of people surveyed; mapping, video calling, m-payments, office software usage and mobile TV rank as the lowest used services in descending order. Less than 20 percent of users said they had used any of these services. Admittedly, several of these services have yet to reach ubiquity across all markets as SMS has.

Big in Japan. The country still leads the way in terms of take-up of the most mobile applications; the US is at the bottom of Universal McCann’s “mobile usage index.”

— Mobile advertising. Interestingly people in less developed markets appear more receptive to mobile advertising: Mexico, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia were the top five in Universal McCann’s “Advertising Acceptiveness Index.” Japan, South Korea, the UK, France and the U.S. were the least receptive.

— A Guardian article leads on some of the standout figures from the UK, which has the highest SMS usage in Europe. On average, in the UK a user sends 100 text messages every month (just think of how many some must send to skew the average so high), compared to 65 messages per user in Germany and a relatively paltry 32 texts in the U.S. The number of SMS texts outnumbers voice calls in the UK, where users make just 76 phone calls per month. Some 90 percent of UK mobile users have taken a photo with their phone; 27 percent have downloaded a video clip. Only eight percent of phone users have tried TV on their mobile, but a third of them have had a positive response.

Link to research

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