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Recom Spot Check - European multi-function mobile phone users
The latest multi-function, multi-media mobile phones have so many features, it’s sometimes easy to forget that you can use them to make calls too.
The advanced facilities offered are so many and varied, it’s doubtful that anyone actually uses all of them – or even knows how to.
This is a market sector that Recom studies on a regular basis. Our Spot Check study of mobile phone users aims to identify their communications needs in the near future. The study is conducted in four territories – UK, France, Germany and Italy.
Our latest survey of mobile phone users revealed even more fascinating findings than usual.
Here are some highlights:
1 Extra features needed
Mobile phones already have many functions and features, but for more than half of their users that’s not enough – they still want more..
Some respondents gave fanciful answers, such as domestic tasks like ironing, making coffee, washing the dishes and controlling their naughty children!
But many constructive and intriguing suggestions were made, such as..
“The phone could communicate between the traffic reports and the alarm clock, so if there are traffic problems it could get you up earlier.”
“I’d like to have control over things like switching the TV or the oven off if I left them on”
“I’d like it to print instant photos from the phone there and then”
“I'd like to speak into it, then using voice recognition it would type up the text for me”
“Car keys, house keys and wallet, all in the phone, with a chip inside so you could scan the phone to pay for tube fares and cabs”
2 Phone rage
Most users suffer from phone anger – they get so annoyed that they want to throw their phone against the wall in frustration with problems like crashing and turning itself off, short battery life and keypad problems.
“The buttons started playing up, calling random numbers, that was really annoying me”
“This phone is particularly irritating, it sometimes locks up when a call is coming in”
“The more complex they are, the more bugs they have”
“Losing calls and being slow to load up, and the memory’s not great, and the card they supply isn’t very good either. They’ve put too much on this phone and it doesn’t have the memory for it”
3 Personalisation
When they look at their mobile phone screen, users would rather see a celebrity or a car than a picture of a friend or pet.
On their phone’s wallpaper, most users have a picture of their partner or kids, or a nice view. But friends and pets don’t have the same appeal - more users have pictures of a celeb or their dream car.
“Picture of Brad Pitt – he’s lovely”
“A Lotus Esprit car - it's the closest I am likely to get to owning one!”
“Picture of my car with a scantily clad female on it”
4 Features are replacing other devices
Multi-function mobiles are rapidly replacing not only paper tools such as diaries, and address books, but also devices such as cameras (analogue and digital), camcorders, Walkmans and even MP3 players.
“I gave my iPod to my Granny as I didn’t need it anymore”
“My phone has replaced my USB memory stick, which was only 1GB, but the phone has a 2GB memory card that I bought for it”
5 Are brands losing their importance?
Many users who have stayed loyal to one brand for years would switch to a good-looking brand they had never heard of, just as long as the phone had the same spec as a known-brand equivalent
“If it’s got everything I require, and it’s got durability, I wouldn’t be that bothered”
“As long as it’s easy to use I would definitely consider it”
6 High levels of dependency
Users are extremely dependent on their mobile phones - nearly two thirds of them could cope without their phone for only a day at the most, but many wouldn’t want to be parted from it at all.
“Going without it for three days once was a killer!”
CONCLUSIONS
What conclusions can we draw from these findings?
One thing that’s clear is that mobile phone users nowadays have something of a love/hate relationship with their phones. They can’t live without them, and can’t bear to be parted from them.
“It runs my life already!”
Today’s multi-function phones have dozens of high-tech features, yet users want even more – and some of them sound straight out of “Star Trek”. Even more important, they want the things to work properly. They’re sick and tired of phones that crash, turn themselves off for no reason and run out of juice at the most inconvenient times.
“What the phone really gives me is more trouble, more hassle. You become very attached to it but not in a pleasant way.”
Mobile phones are rapidly evolving into complex multi-function devices that hold not only contact phone numbers but also personal content such as music, pictures, calendar, games, purchases, financial data, and much more. Losing such content can be disastrous - in effect, the phone’s content is becoming more important than the phone itself. Although brand is important, the differentiating factor of the future may be the trust that users place in mobile phone companies to look after their content.
Please contact us by clicking here if you would like to receive a copy of the full survey report.
