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07/25/2006: "Mobile Life 2006"

Research released by YouGov yesterday regarding mobile phone usage in the UK makes fascinating reading. As part of the research YouGov spoke to 16,500 British adults regarding their mobile phone usage so this was a pretty significant sample. The headline figures were:

• Almost half, 46.5%, of people who work use their mobile phone as part of their job. 24% do so regularly
  
• Almost half of these workers say they never, or hardly ever, turn their phones off
  
• People who use a mobile phone for work have significantly more daily calls than the rest – 50% have six or more daily calls compared with only 5% of people who do not use a mobile phone for work.

With such a large number of people with mobile phones the turnover is quite large, something that the report also looked at:

"Apart from first-time mobile phone-owners, and those who need a new one because their old one has been lost or stolen, every new phone means the disposal of an old one. As many as 37% say they simply held on to their last phone, which implies a vast phone mountain exists in Britain today. 24% gave their old phone away, 16% recycled it, 8% traded it in at the shop where they obtained their new phone and 4% threw it away. Older people are more likely than the under 30s to recycle their old phones, younger people to hang on to it."

Something we have been trying to encourage here at AppSwing is for more people to recycle their old phones and we have partnered with the charity YouthNet to do this.
Each phone that is recycled brings the charity on average £5 When you consider that 52% of phones currently don't get recycled this could potentially be a large source of revenue for the charity. If you have a phone you want to recycle just follow the link above and follow the simple instructions.

If you want to read the rest of the YouGov report then goto Mobile Life Report 2006