People play more on their smartphones than work, says an interesting survey conducted by Nielsen Research.
Out of all smartphone owners in the USA, the research company quizzed, 64 per cent say they played games in the past month on their devices; whereas only 21 per cent used it for productivity apps. Other apps which are popular on smartphones include weather, maps and social networking apps.
A Nielsen blog post says, “Among smartphone consumers who have played mobile games in the past 30 days, those with iPhones, Windows 7 phones or Android phones are the most likely to have downloaded the games they played, while those with Blackberry phones or feature phones tend to play pre-loaded games.”
“The average mobile gamer plays an average of 7.8 hours a month. Those with iPhones tend to play around 14.7 hours each month while those with Android smartphones play around 9.3 hours per month,” it further added.
An earlier survey, conducted by Nielsen in September 2010, also showed similar results saying games were the most popular App but with a slightly smaller market share.
Nielsen surveys over 20,000 mobile users every month both online and by telephone for collecting information on different topics.
Android users play mobile games on their devices for 9.3 hours every month, whereas Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry users play games for 4.7 hours and 4.5 hours every month. Nielsen also found that 93 per cent smartphone users were open to the idea of paying for mobile games.
The news turns out to be not so good for companies which had begun to allow, although unwittingly, their employees to bring their iPhones and Android devices to work.
While it is not possible to stop the employees from bringing their own smartphones at work, the companies can definitely adopt better policies to manage the smartphone usage so the productivity doesn’t suffer and employees too do not feel unfairly restricted. Employees using smartphones may also end up downloading something on the company Wi-Fi network which may not be in the interest of the organisation.
Notably, Gartner had earlier estimated that the worldwide gaming spend was going to increase up to $74 billion in 2011.