This slideshow from CIO Insight not only highlights the unusual places workers use their smart phones to check in with the office, but how often they do so. Results include:
- 62% during a meal
- 60% while on vacation
- 18% while on a date (No wonder these folks are still single.)
- 11% at church
- 54% while driving (Gasp!)
- 57% in the bathroom (I don’t want to think about it…)
Second highest at 59 percent, professional/business service workers like those in IT say they check in while driving. (66 percent of sales employees do this.)
More than 5,200 employees participated in this survey conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder.
To review the entire slideshow, click here.
You’d have to be living in a remote cave for several years now not to realize mobile phones are changing the world. You can begin comprehending the impact of these ubiquitous mobile devices by reading a recent survey from global market-research firm Synovate, involving 8,000 cell phone owners across 11 world markets.
“Three quarters of the survey respondents — including 82 percent of Americans — never leave home without their phones, and 36 people of people across the world (42 percent of Americans) go as far as to say they ‘cannot live without’ their cell phone,” the report states.
Overall, 23 percent of respondents own more than two mobile phones. Americans are among the most likely to own at least two at 33 percent, along with the French at 34 percent. Brits and Americans were the most likely to own a smartphone at 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
“This sheer volume, coupled with enormous marketing potential that is just starting to be realized, means that marketers need to understand as much as possible about how people use their phones, how they feel about them and what they want more of,” says Steve Garton, the firm’s head of global media.
To learn more about the Synovate survey and its findings, click here.
New patents filed by Apple and Microsoft provide tantalizing glimpses of where the smartphone is headed.
Microsoft’s patent describes a docking station for the smartphone and explains: “The dock should be small enough that you could stick it in a briefcase or bag to take on business trips, allowing you do tasks such as giving presentations without having to carry a laptop.”
Microsoft’s docking station would utilize the phone’s memory and processor to reconfigure an assortment of peripherals. “For example, if the paired devices determine a game controller is connected to the dock, the smartphone assumes that you are at a specific location and configures the interface to reflect the parameters that are used at that location,” according to technology consultant Michael Kassner. “How cool is that?”
Meanwhile buried in Apple’s new patent regarding its iPhone heuristic user interface are clear references to upcoming smartphone video applications. Alexander Wolfe writes in InformationWeek about Apple’s leap forward into smartphone video-conferencing capabilities:
“In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition.
“In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display.
“In some embodiments, the position of the optical sensor can be changed by the user (e.g., by rotating the lens and the sensor in the device housing) so that a single optical sensor may be used along with the touch screen display for both video conferencing and still and/or video image acquisition.”
It’s pretty clear that the two technology giants see different futures for the smartphone, yet the technology described in both patents mean our mobile communications are about to take some huge leaps forward.
