Report: iPhone Owners Favor Personal Uses, Other Smartphones More For Business
A survey of 600 smartphone users by Compete (part of TNS Media) has added some weight behind the widely held notion that the iPhone is mostly a consumer device, while most smartphones are targeted at business users. “73 percent of iPhone owners used their mobile devices primarily for personal reasons, like entertainment. By comparison, 59 percent of owners with other types of smartphones — from manufacturers like HTC, Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) and Nokia
I wonder how many of that other group of smart phone users don't add applications as much because it just isn't that easy?
I used a Palm Pilot and then a Palm Treo for years before my iPhone and despite being a long time tech user adding apps to my Treo was always a pain in the neck and I was always worried it was going to cause my phone to lock up and cause problems with getting my emails and calls.
With my iPhone it's a piece of cake and the apps are vetted more thoroughly.
The other phone makers are getting there with Android and BB phones getting close. But I suspect ease of installing apps has a lot more to do with that stat then the actual interest the users might have in installing other apps (and most likely games) if it were easy to do so.
The survey found that 13 percent of people who hadn't downloaded a single app gave the reason that they didn't know how to. It's not the majority, but it is a significant figure.
Nokia, Samsung, LG, Palm, Motorola, HTC, rim. All of them are expenses.
iPhone is the only one that makes money for you, and helps you to help money. By giving you a free thing to write application programs with that run on the iPhone, iPod, Mac right away.
Imagine developing your own program that gives you 3 correct lottery numbers so you can multiply your money 10 times every lottery draw. How about that great inventory control program for your store? A program that read a label and tell you what you are eating? A heart rate monitor that automatically calls an ambulance? A GPS that guides you out of the woods?
No others do as much as an iPhone as well as taking instructions directly from you as well as giving you vital messages and services either created by youself, or acquired from others.
As iPhone enters her second birthday, I wonder if iPhone should be more aptly renamed as iGuardianAngel.
I read the press release (which, like all others from market research firms, has a controversial headline and is designed to get someone to buy the whole report).
As someone who has constructed many research instruments, you really need to see the actual questions asked respondents to do a proper analysis and draw meaningful conclusions.
Here's one hypothesis about iPhone personal versus business use:
- Let's assume smartphone users were asked how much time they spend on various business and personal activities (including music, web access, email, games, etc.)
- Remember the iPhone is also a very capable iPod that can store up to 3,500 songs on the 16GB version and having one capable device, rather than two is very attractive.
- A large number of workers listen to music while at work, not just during leisure time
Should we really be surprised that music use might dominate cell phone use for iPhone owners (who while "at work" use their computers and business phones for most of their work-related activities)?
We would need to dig deeper to see better real "personal" versus "work" use.
For the record, I have been involved in primary research, used personal computers, stored music and talked on cell phones for longer than I would like to admit. My previous devices were a Windows-based desktop, a Mac laptop, an iPod and a 3G smartphone. Currently, I use a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 3G. That's 4 devices reduced to 2 devices …
The research of Compete has to be discounted for "app fatigue". A business smartphone wins over a consumer-electronics device like the iPhone in the long run. Pinch Media showed the evidence of "app fatigue" and short lifecycle. Pinch analyzed 30 million downloads to show only 30% use same day and only 5% after 20 days.
iPhone is unquestionably the most versatile smartphone today, capable of performing personal, business, or community affairs. The variety, availability, and ease of the iPhone is the tops of the industry and people and organizations are clearly gravitating to the iPhone. It is too early to tell how widely the iPhone will be adopted for various purposes but surely the iPhone is still evolving at a pace that places it way ahead of the pack.
Looks like the data are from the US – not worldwide? This should be mentioned clearly in the beginning of the piece.
The App Store icon looks just like the other icons therefore it is usually overlooked by the iPhone owner. One solution is for the iPhone OS to lock the App Store icon as the very first icon so that iPhone users can always access the App Store conveniently. The App Store icon should also provide a wizard to help the iPhone owner in shopping on the App Store.
The App Store already tops the industry. With a few enhancements such as adding some CRM like features the App Store is easily the tool of choice for consumers, merchants and vendors and easily become a serious threat to Amazon and eBay.
For real economists the iPhone is capable of running SAS 9.0 and similar statistics and economic modelling applications which can easily be portable from Unix to the iPhone OS running locally on the iPhone communicating with external source systems. SAS Graphs can easily run on the large iPhone screen. With iPhone Bluetooth SAS graphs can be printed on Bluetooth graphic printers, sent to Bluetooth storage devices, other Bluetooth devices without the need for any Wifi or servers.
iPhone is poised to enable powerful server-less peer to peer communication making wireless networking unnecessary. The future of iPhone is controlled by the protocols incorporated into the iPhone OS and frankly, there is no limit to how the iPhone can communicate and work, even with mixing protocols simultaneously with multi-inbound-outbound processing to enable multithreading workflows handling extremely complex business or personal or community scenarios, freeing us from singlethreading processing which is not really what reality should be because the world does multithread all the time. iPhone allows the programmers to further approach natural reality instead of the current limited simulating of the real world using the old outdated technologies. iPhone is really a better future that allows us to achieve a more realistic present today.