Study: Email access is still king on mobile phones

by Jason Harris Jan 23rd 2008

According to Webcredible, a usability and accessibility consultancy, the most requested mobile service people wanted on their data-enabled mobile phones was email. 33% of respondents stated email was their most needed mobile utility. This may offer some explanation as to why the iPhone is the number 2 smartphone behind RIM. Business users, who still dominate the smartphone market, want access to email to get their business done.

Access to social networks came in a close second in requested features, taking 25% in survey results. This tells us that many mobile phone users like to hop on MySpace or Facebook in between sending all those emails. As adoption of social networks becomes more mainstream, we expect social networking will take over as the number one requested mobile feature.

As a last statistic, local information requests were third on the list at 20%. These requests consist of questions such as "what's around me?" With services such as Google Maps My Location, which tracks your location in a GPS-like service, local information requests a fantastic tool to have access to. With friends and you want to find the closest pizza place, with My Location you can easily look it up and get your pie eating on.

These mobile services add countless features to your daily working life, especially for nomadic mobile phone users. What is your favorite mobile service? We look forward to seeing the comments!

Tags: email, facebook, iphone, myspace, smartphone

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Phillip Miller said 9:13AM on 1-23-2008

I would be interesting to know the age of the respondents to the survey. I bet there would be a big divide if they were separated into age groups.

keeves said 10:25AM on 1-23-2008

I think there would also be a big divide when you separate up into disposable income. The people who are buying these phones are generally business people. I would have thought that email access for this target market would be a much more important feature than social sites.

students etc who are more likely to want the social sites, are less likely to be able to afford (or justify spending) on one of these phones.

iamhoff said 5:02PM on 1-23-2008

I got my GF an iPhone for Christmas (she's not very tech-savvy, but she likes her gadgets). The email feature is very cool, but having full html access for local info needs (we're in LA for the day, I wonder where this is...). It's actually not bad as a phone, but the web interface is slick.

michael said 11:05AM on 1-24-2008

Seeing as I'm still waiting for good spam fighting software for my blackberry..... I'd have to say the GPS navigation feature is the best.

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