Indians spend over 3 hrs on Smartphones, up 57% over last two years

India is a nation of the ‘young’. And the young are spending more and more time on the smartphone. In metros like Mumbai, where slums choke entire localities, the intrepid user is getting on to apps to conduct business, says the Ericsson ConsumerLab Report 2014, which was released on Tuesday.

The report, based on a survey carried out in April-June 2014 among 4000 smatrphone users across 18 urban centres, says on an average, Indians spend three hours on their smartphones, around one-third of that time is spent on using apps.   

The share of the urban less educated, low income mobile data users has risen, and the older generation is going furiously digital. And apps! They have acquired the status of ‘must-have’, with a 63% increase in app-usage in the last two years. 

New usage patterns are emerging, such as 40% of usage is no longer limited to socialmedia and chat-apps. Mobile video usage is evolving -- moving beyond the bedroom, and into the kitchen and the workplace, right on to the road outside -- with the help of video streaming apps. 

One in three smartphone users watches videos shared by friends. Users now spend 198 minutes on smartphones, conpared to 128 minutes watching TV. This is just one of the many ways smartphone users are consuming online video. “Flawless mobile video experience will be the key accelerating usage,” says Ajay Gupta, VP-Strategy and Marketing, Ericsson India. 

The report says 12% housewives use smartphones as portable video players while somebody else in the family watches TV! And, this is sort of chic, religious chic: 10% of mobile users start the day watching spiritual videos on the smartphone.    

That’s the upside. There’s a downside, too. As smartphone users watch more, tolerance for delays is on a short-circuit. Appetite for watching online exists but so do issues with downloading and streaming, with 65% of mobile broadband users preferring to stream rather than download videos. But 4 out of 10 videos played buffer or stall, taking the kick out of the ‘watching’.

“What’s happening is that network performance is being redefined based on how consumers build perceptions and real performance  is then delivered on these perception drivers,” says Gupta. 

Consumer perception of mobile data experience is built on several factors: Internet connection drop rate; webpage load time; app download time; indoor connectivity; video buffering or stalling frequency; picture upload time on social media and transfer time for sharing media on chat apps. 

“But 40% face issues with slow webpage download time, 44% of the time smartphone users do not have mobile broadband network coverage, 43% of webpages take more than 10 seconds to load while 58% of users expect mobile webpage load time to be around 3 seconds,” says Nishant Batra, VP-Engagement Practices, Ericsson India.

The report says there’s a discrepancy between smartphone users’ expectations and their actual experiences. Half of all issues encountered by mobile broadband users today in cities like ‘dense’ Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi are faced indoors. Interestingly, smartphone users prioritised the service provider’s ability to solve mobile data issues as and when they arise over cheap mobile data tariffs or plans.

* 60% of Indians check their smartphones on an average 77 times a day, with 26% of them doing it over 100 times a day!
* Share of the urban less educated, low income mobile data users has risen from 39% in 2012 to 55% in 2013 
* Older generation is also going furiously digital: from 4% in 2012 to 13% in 2013
* Indians spend 3 hours and 18 minutes ( or 198 minutes, in the US it is 132 minutes) on their smartphones, and one-third of this time on apps 
* 40% of smartphone usage is no longer limited to social media and chat-apps
* 11% of working professionals shop online using smartphones even when at work
* 24% smartphone users use apps like whatsapp, wechat for business purposes
* Online video watching has outpaced TV watching 
* Broadband smartphone users spend 61% more time watching online video than non-users
* 12% housewives use smartphones as portable video players 
* 40% watch online video on the smartphone late at night in bed
* 25% watch online video on the mobile while commuting
* 23% watch online video on smartphones while at dinner
* 20% watch while shopping
* 76% of smartphone users are willing to pay more for a guaranteed better mobile data experience

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