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How do you use your smartphone? How do you stack up to national averages? O2 conducted a survey of how 2,000 smartphone users to see how they used their phones. Take a look and see how you compare. They found that:

• We spend 24 minutes a day browsing the Internet
• 16 minutes a day on social networks
• Just 15 minutes listening to music on our smartphones
• And 13 minutes playing games
• That’s the same amount of time as we take to make calls every day
• We spend 11 minutes text messaging
• Just nine minutes writing and sending emails
• We use eight minutes every day to read a book on our smartphone
• Just seven minutes watching TV or films
• Unbelievably only three minutes taking pictures

Despite these seemingly short periods of time spent doing any one task on our smartphones, we actually spend an average of two hours every day focused on them. That’s more time than we spend with our partners with whom we spend roughly a third less.

More statistics

This survey also found that we were replacing several pieces of household equipment because our mobile phone gave us the same or a similar function. Consequently more than half of us (57%) have done away with an alarm clock and use our smartphone to wake us up.

Half of us no longer wear a watch as we use our smartphones to check the time. And just less than this, 46% of us, don’t use a camera anymore, apart from the one on our smartphone. Just one device to carry!

25% of us don’t bother with our laptop anymore but access all we need via our smartphone. The same fate has happened to games consoles with 12% using their smartphone to play games.

Applications for our every whim

Online newspaper reading is common now rather than subscribing to or picking up a newspaper each day. Few have then delivered anymore either. Some newspapers to substitute revenue from traditional print now offer digital subscriptions. We suspect we will see more of this too.

As well as these very straight forward and obvious alternative uses, we must remember that with new Apps appearing everyday many smartphone users operate their whole lives from their smartphone.

Standard applications include diaries and reminder services so that you don’t need to miss appointments or meetings any more.

GPS or SatNav are also available via smartphones so there is no need to buy a separate gadget for in-car use.

You can check what the weather will be like in your home town or other locations so that you know what to wear or whether or not to organise a BBQ. Even if forecasts are unreliable, at least the many Apps give you a heads up on what to expect.

All purpose

With such an all-purpose mobile device, you can understand why other items are becoming obsolete. After all it is much easier to have one-does-it-all tool. Of course the more we depend on our smartphones the more we need to keep them safely in our possession.

They are relatively delicate in the scheme of things though so we also need to protect all our data by storing it in the Cloud somewhere – a good back-up. We also need to make sure we have good mobile insurance for the inappropriate times when our smartphone goes missing or ‘gives up the ghost’. We can’t survive without it.