In U.K., Smart Phone Owners Make More Calls. Why?

Smart phone users in the United Kingdom make calls more often than feature phone users. Some 81 percent of smart phone owners surveyed on behalf of Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, reported using their smart phones to make calls every day, compared to 53 percent of feature phone users.

So one might be tempted to think that there is something about smart phone owners that makes their behavior different. Ofcom suggests a more prosaic answer. The differences in usage can be explained by the different types of contracts smart phone and feature phone owners tend to buy.

Contract phone users make calls significantly more often than pay-as-you-go users overall. This has been confirmed by analyzing the research results, isolating the feature mobile phone users on contracts and comparing them with smart phone users on contracts, says Ofcom.

When looked at that way, call frequency profiles are similar for both, with one exception.

But there are differences between regular and smartphone pay-as-you-go users; Smart phone users on pay-as-you-go service plans also make calls more frequently.

The same pattern holds for use of text messaging. Seventy-nine percent of smart phone owners claim to make and receive SMS texts on their mobile every day, compared to 50 percent of regular phone users. This difference, again, can partly be explained by contract type, with higher numbers of smart phone users being on a contract.

When isolating regular mobile phone users on contracts and comparing them with smart phone users on contracts, their text messaging frequency profiles are very similar. However, there are differences between regular and smart phone casual-use customers.  Smart phone users send and receive significantly higher levels of text messages than feature phone users on similar plans.