Blighty a 'smartphone society' amid rise of 4G middle class Ofcom has published its twelfth annual Communications Market report, featuring a modest analysis of how British society is accommodating technology by declaring that "the UK is now a smartphone society". Published today, Ofcom's 431-page Communications Market Report 2015 [PDF] has found that a third (33 per cent) of internet …
This is kind of intriguing, what the other 4% use. I assume they're mostly a bit confused, but plausibly...
- Perhaps the poll wording leaves phablet owners choosing "other" over "phone" or "tablet"?
- Google glass :)
- Optimus rift et al
- Braille and speech interfaces for the vision impaired
- Internet enabled TV sets
Go on everybody...
@Morte66
Smart TVs and other streaming devices probably have a large enough share to account for 4% so no need to look much further.
The other possibility that comes to mind are people who use their employer's PC/laptop to access the Internet, not their own, and so chose other.
One in five adults (19%) have posted things online they wish they hadn’t. In contrast, almost three-quarters of adults (72%) agreed that they ‘can’t understand why people share personal information with people they don’t know well or at all’, increasing to 82% of those aged 55 and over. Similarly, almost six in ten online adults (57%) disagree about being ‘happy to share information online that a wide audience can see’.
So there is still some hope.
Ofcom believes the rise is being driven by 4G mobile broadband, with subscriptions rising from 2.7m to 23.6m during 2014.
I take it they haven't differentiated between having a subscription that claims to offer 4G "where available", and the reality that at best you'll see speeds barely better than HSPA+, and in both cases large areas of the country don't get either?
Maybe it's not the technology, just all those Kevin Bacon adverts, persuading people to spend two hours a day staring at their tiny screens?
My Mum has celebrated her 76th year by joining into the smartphone gang. But there are still some holdouts. I've still got a few friends who refuse to upgrade from ancient candybar phones - and I know a couple who don't even own mobiles.
I don't understand it. They're so useful. I've had a mobile since as soon as they were sanely affordable, in the early/mid-90s. I stayed out of smartphones too long, until the company forced my hand. But now I wouldn't be without access to my diary/address book/phone/sat-nav/public transport/weather app/shopping list - and I also use email and a bit of light browsing.
I still think it's horses for courses. I think the ultimate computing experience is sat at a desktop, where you can have the keyboard and screen set up ergonomically. And have access to a keyboard. As a touch-typist all other input methods are hugely frustrating due to their slowness and inaccuracy. I guess it's probaby different if you're not - as they're probably equally bad.
I hate laptops with a passion, due to the horrible closeness of keyboard to screen. Also I've got fat hands, the keyboards are often a few percent smaller than standard, and I keep knocking the touchpad and losing the cursor. Why can't they implement palm detection and/or have an off-switch? My old HP swivel tablet (TX2000) had a little off switch on the touchpad, along with other thoughtful features, although sadly also Vista and a deeply rubbish fingerprint scanner.
If I read El Reg, it's skiving at work on the desktop, or at home on the tablet - on the sofa. Tablets are great for t'intertubes. I can't imagine why anyone would choose to use a laptop on the sofa, when they have a tablet. Except for typing of course. Sadly I love pen input, but I'm in a minority.
Phones are too small for me. But that's mostly due to dodgy eyesight, so I have to have the text too big. I browse on there when I need to know something, when out and about. Otherwise it's the tablet.
As to "other", are people using smart TVs or smart watches?
Me it's probably half desktop / half tablet for personal stuff. The smartphone is only a tool.
I wonder if they took age into consideration? I doubt that many over 40s consider their phone to be their primary portal onto the web. Eyes and possibly fingers just won't be up to the job.
Personally I'm surprised anyone sees it as a primary device. I've travelled fairly widely around the UK and even in areas like central Birmingham where my phone said it had H+ the experience was irritating with lots of stops and starts and fairly slow loading. Pretty much felt like using an analogue modem.
I don't think I've ever had a browsing experience with my S3 that was even close to what I get from a computer linked to a wired connection.
The slowdown is your phone rendering the webpage, not the connection.
I don't think so. I just tried it at home where it has wifi and it seems fine.
For what it's worth It's not actually an S3. I dropped that phone early this year. It's an S3 Neo although granted I don't think there's a great deal of difference between them. Anyway the laptop I use at home is over five years old and it renders web pages absolutely fine ;)
It could be my connection provider of course. I use Virgin Mobile and at one point in the distant past the connection speed appeared throttled. That's no longer the case though. This evening on my golf course I tried to get to a web page to remind myself how to fix my fade. It took ages for Google to display search results and I gave up waiting for web pages to finish loading. Piqued by this discussion I ran a speed test and got a very dodgy looking graph that claimed an average of 2.4Mb/s with a peak of 4Mb/s. That should be plenty for browsing.
So I think the problem is inconsistency in the throughput and/or latency. Either way despite having an 'H+' connection on the golf course I never did manage to get to any useful web pages. I couldn't afford to stand around in everyone's way for long enough.
The difference I noticed when we moved to 4G wasn't so much the extra speed, as pages seem to take similar times to load. It was the massive improvement in upload speed, to send out your requests. It still doesn't feel as fast as on a wired connection though, even when it's notionally much faster.
I am an absolute Luddite when it comes to smartphones. I am still not sure having something people can use to contact me anywhere is such a good idea, let alone one that you might be able to use to "do work!"
When people in the office are playing Smart Phone Top Trumps, I have to play "Battery Life" every time ;) Which reminds me, haven't charged the phone this month yet.
"I am an absolute Luddite when it comes to smartphones. I am still not sure having something people can use to contact me anywhere is such a good idea, let alone one that you might be able to use to "do work!""
You are no more contactable than with a dumb-phone, are you? no-one would be forcing you to "do work", and email can easily be ignored, too. and the benefits include maps, web browsing, and smart apps such as train times or hire bike status (in London). and so on and so on.
There is a halfway house here.
you can have a smartphone and use if for essential things like you mentioned (train times,maps etc) wihout going the whole way and using Facebook Twatter and the like.
Oh yes, it can be used as a phone.
Browsing the internet? The screen is fr too small for my aging eyes. The laptop is far more readable and the browser give me a more pleasurable experience than any mobile device especially with plugins like Adblock+, No Flash installed etc etc
I can also touch type on the laptop. I can't do that on my smartphone because of my fat fingers
See, people have different needs and experiences. Not everyone is the same. It is was the world would be very boring
I use a desktop for both gaming and reading El Reg and a laptop for email and gaming (and reading El Reg) when I'm away so clearly I'm also some kind of mutant 'other'. Or being stupidly over-literal because sometimes it's just inevitable. That's polls for you.
And I'll repeat a remark I made earlier about Mr Romero's fine documentaries applying to smartphone users, certainly in relation to shambling around aimlessly and the seemingly unstoppable spread of the infection...
I don't trust my smart phone and the internet together, with all the vulnerabilities and privacy implications out there, so I only use it for calls, music and camera. Plus, my bare-minimum tariff wouldn't allow much www anyway, so I use wifi on the phone if I'm that desperate to see something on a screen so small I'd need to whip out the reading glasses :)
I surf online with Ad/Script blocking on the good ol' fashioned desktop at a comfortable desk (hence "other"), in addition to an occasional laptop and a netbook that's still going strong after 5 years. And I'm not ashamed to admit it (despite always posting Anon here)!
Laptop to read thereg (actually, usually a netbook or my Compulab Fit-pc) I focused on activity not device.
I do game, but not online (too much a time-sink). I'm still using a Nokia N900 for text,phone and as alarm clock and rarely connect it to the wifi (more likely to use my 3Ds for mobile browsing, especially on strange wifis)
Desktop for email and word processing.
Tablet for reading El Reg, random voting by accident, and losing posts when they are ready to submit.
What about Raspberry Pi users? Where do they fit in?
Other because the poll is wierd.
Oh, and my Good Lady has two laptops - one upstsirs and one downstairs. Allows me free use of our tablet. In fact it is usually tablet upstairs and desktop downstairs for me.
I have even read El Reg on my smartphone, but it takes a bit more effort.
Also the Kindle app on my smartphone works really well, surprisingly.
Seems some people took this poll way too seriously. Can't you see that the answers are made as funny stereotypical comments? I don't own a laptop, and only use a smartphone for testing websites. I'm not a big gamer at all but could see that picking the desktop option is the correct one for me.
On topic, for me at least, it's all about addiction. People who are sensible can use the phone when they need to for directions, looking up stuff, quickly checking email, social media etc. You can do all of this in under an hour's use a day if you wanted to. Unfortunately smartphones are extremely addictive. You see people on social media and games and they go for hours and hours at a time. Just sitting on that tube and thinking about stuff is now considered boring and you must be too poor to own a phone or tablet or a decent data plan. Like other addictions only the user can tell themselves that they are addicted and need to stop or ration its use.
I went to a party a few months ago and there were 10 people sitting around the front room, and every single one of them was staring at the phones and no-one talking to each other. If that isn't the epitomy of smartphone addiction I don't know what is. I got up and left; life is worth much more than that.
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