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Get Smart! Or not…

May 4, 2011 4:00 by Eva Fernandes

The whole of this month Kippreport will feature a special report on Mobile Technology. What better way to kick it off than to find out how our dear Kipp readers use their mobile phones?

A week or two back we asked, “What feature do you most use on your phone?” and results were just a little startling. To begin with, only nine percent said they used their phones for social media “stuff” and 28 percent said they most use their phones to SMS. The surprising part? Well a good 63 percent agreed with the statement: “I use it the way Alexander Graham Bell intended: talking on the phone.”

Pretty shocking results considering we live in a city filled with Crack-berries whose fingers are fused onto their qwerty keys. In fact, just this morning Kipp found ourselves sitting next to three other people on the metro who had headphones plugged into their ears, their heads hung low, eyes fixed on their glowing screens and their fingers ceaselessly typing. Rather de-humanizing, but considering that Kipp’s readers are the sophisticate savvy lot we know you to be, it is rather shocking to find out only four percent said they use their phones for “social media stuff” with the remaining 96 percent divided between sending text messages and making phone calls.

In retrospect though, it probably shouldn’t be too surprising, given recent research from Forrester’s which claimed: “2011 will be the year of the “dumb” smartphone user. “

So what exactly is a dumb smartphone user? This is what Forrester has to say: “Thanks to handset subsidies, smartphones will be available to the masses. Expect new smartphone users to be less engaged and active than the first cohorts of Android and iPhone early adopters.

“The good news is that thanks to customer education and the convenience that these devices offer, even “dumb” smartphone users will consume more mobile media than ever before and will have incremental usage of mobile data,” said.

In response to these findings, some have suggested ways to become a smart smart-phone user. Like one should use your phone to be more productive, to be more connected to the social sphere and to capture and share inspiration.

Quite frankly, Kipp isn’t quite sure why being a ‘dumb smartphone’ user is such a bad thing after all. As per the definition, the dumb smart phone user refers to those who use their smart phones to browse the internet, check mail, use instant messengers and use “social media stuff.” Well isn’t that enough? Just because one’s phone has enough apps loaded on it to check your heart rate, the weather outside and the rate of nuclear of fission, doesn’t necessarily mean one has to use it so.