The impact of mobile: bigger than you think?

This week’s TIME Magazine has a spread all about how mobile
technologies are changing our world.

There are stories of how it’s changing elections, charity,
privacy and more, as well as getting rid of our wallets of course.

The wallet piece is pretty weak to be honest, with the story of one of their journo’s spending a
week cashless in America with just Google Wallet and Square.  The conclusion is that Square is pretty cool,
Wallet breaks down too often, whilst being cashless is fine in principle but in
practice meant that he had to borrow money from his wife for beers at the
ballgame.

Sounds good to me.

In other pieces, there is a discussion of next generation
retail experiences where:

• The store pushes you offers based upon your age, sex and
  other demographics as you walk through the aisles (that’s already here);
• You can get news and reviews of goods in real-time before
  you buy instore by checking out websites like decide.com; and 
• The sales assistant in the designer clothes store is a
  remote expert who advises you which tie goes best with the shirt you’re buying
  over a video call (I hate that idea!).

The bit I liked best is the numbers.

TIME did a poll of 4,700 people worldwide online, with a
further 300 interviewed over the phone during July 2012.

The results are interesting.

• 76% of consumers see being constantly connected
  by mobile as helpful (13% see it as a burden)
• 68% sleep with their phone next to the bed,
  whilst a further 16% have their mobile somewhere in the bedroom 
• 58% find that being constantly connected by mobile makes it easier to be away from the family
• 53% are in closer contact with their
  friends
• 49% reckon they are better informed about news
• 44% check their wireless device as the first and
  last thing they do every day
• 44% believe that it allows them to make decisions
  more quickly
• 41% manage more work thanks to being wireless
• 32% prefer to communicate via text
  messages
• 29% lock their mobile and use a pass code to unlock
  it (so 71% of mobiles are unsecured!)

Finally, they looked at the use of and attitudes towards mobile
technologies across 8 countries, and find that:

• The Chinese find that mobile devices create rows with their
  partners (60%),
  closely followed by the Indians (58%); Chinese folks also browse and search the
  internet, read news and check the weather more than any other nation; and
• India is the country that most enjoys working with mobile, with a
  massive 63% able to manage more work, with India also the nation that make and
  receive more calls and text messages, send and receive more emails, visit more
  social networks than any other nation (as well as receiving more payments
  too!).

Surprisingly, the impact of mobile technologies has least changed the lives of people in
America and the UK, when compared with India, China and Brazil.

Maybe that’s not so surprising as mobile technologies have
developed to engage all of society – the rich and poor – more than any previous
technology.

In other words, the fact that a billion Chinese (75% of the
country) and a billion Indians (76%) now use a technology when previous
technologies – laptops, PCs and such like – were prohibitively  expensive, means that all of us are now
seeing the benefits of wireless access to electronic processing.

Source: Wikipedia