Mobile phone usage report 2011: The things you do

Not needed

We now come to the features, which are the easiest to live without. Those are things people have on their phones but do not use, or lack but don’t want either.

Audio books and podcasts scrape bottom here with more than 60% of mobile users not interested. Books are doing worse with 61.2%, while podcasts are considered useless by “just” 60.7% of you. Somewhat surprisingly these two features are doing notably better in the 50+ age group, where the percentages are brought down to 58.6% and 53.4% respectively.

Weight-tracking completes the anti-award top three but that was to be expected – it’s always been a niche feature. Users of age above 50 are least conscious about their weight (62.9%), while nearly half of teenagers (or 48.2% to be exact) either uses or wants to use some weight-tracking app on their cell phones.

Despite being the least used feature currently (and by some distance) video-calling only ranks fourth here with 50.6%. The difference here comes from the number of people who don’t use it, but would fancy trying it (more on them later). People aged over 32 are mostly indifferent to video-calling, while it is relatively more popular among those aged 25-32 – just 49.1% of them have dismissed it.

Most missed

Next up is a list of features that people would like to have on their phone. It’s the features most of you have been missing for various reasons –.either the phone doesn’t support them, your carrier bills you out of them or they just haven’t been available yet.

Shock and horror, it’s video-calling in the lead with 22.9%. People who have the feature enabled apparently have no interest in using it, while those who don’t have video-calls are pretty eager to try them. That’s why we feel that despite the high demand this feature might not substantially gain in popularity in the future – it has been tried and rejected once already.

We guess the prospects of the next two features in this list are better (Streaming over TV-out and remote controlling another device). Those have only recently started making their way to mass-market devices and cell phones have been becoming increasingly good at them.

FullHD video streaming has already began to appear on high-end devices, while even mid-range ones can do 720p now. And as mobile data speeds are improving remote-controlling your PC is becoming more and more of an enjoyable experience.

Now that we’ve covered the best and the worst we’d be looking at each feature on its own, trying to explain why it is used the way it is.