South African cellphone facts revealed

Staff Writer MyBroadband | 14 June, 2010

If you feel like you spend half your day on your cellphone, you have this in common with as many as one in six South Africans.
Dial Direct recently ran an online, independent survey to gain greater insight into South Africa’s cellphone habits, and the findings showed an interesting swing towards the use of cellphones for social media.

Respondents were asked questions including:

1. How much time (on average) do you spend on your cellphone per day?
2. Which function is most important to you above and beyond phoning?
3. Do you use your cellphone more for social purposes or business?
4. Do you prefer talking or SMSing?
5. Do you frequently use your cellphone to access social networking sites, and, how important is your cellphone to you?

Time spent on the cellphone

18% of the respondents said they spent more than five hours a day on their cellphones, while just over a quarter put that figure at four hours. 56% of respondents indicated that they used their cellphones for two hours every day.

Functionality

Apart from making and receiving cellphone calls, sending and receiving SMSes ranked as the most important functionality offered, with 58% respondents indicating that this was the case.
Just over 30% of respondents indicated that email was the most important function after making calls. Far fewer indicated that they used their cellphones predominantly for its camera (after making and receiving calls).

Business and pleasure

A high proportion of respondents (63%) indicated that they used their cellphones for social purposes only, while 37% said they used their cellphones for both social and business purposes.

Talking vs SMSes

Of those surveyed, 72% reported that they preferred talking on their cellphones to sending SMSes.

Social networking

When asked about whether or not they used their cellphones for social networking, 121 respondents said they did, while 90 said they did not.
The vast majority of respondents indicated that they subscribed to Facebook, with 12.5% of respondents using their cellphones for Twitter, and far fewer for MXIT and banking.

The importance of connectivity

135 of the respondents told Dial Direct Insurance that their cellphones were very important to them, while 69 people remarked that they were ‘necessary’. Just 2.3% of respondents said their cellphones were not important to them.

“This survey provided very interesting and useful results about cellphone usage in South Africa,” said Dial Direct Insurance’s spokesperson, Bradley Du Chenne. “It is evident that South Africans make full use of the technology their cellphones offer, and that the cellphone is a vital form of communication in terms of both business and leisure.”