If you have a smartphone, what activity do you conduct most often on your favorite little handheld device? If you’re like most Brits, the functions you use your phone for are likely social networking. In fact, Facebook is garnering a truly incredible amount of time that folks in the UK spend on their mobile phones.
ComScore, a mobile research firm, looked at how Brits use their phones and saw that Facebook’s 7.5 million unique mobile users spent 2.5 billion minutes on it’s side in the month of December 2010. What site ranked second? Google – with only 9.5 million users spending a weak 702 minutes on it’s site. This delta in time spent on Facebook and Google might be hard to comprehend without a little bit of graphic aide – so check out the chart below.
So, as you can see, Facebook is absolutely killing the competition when it comes to “stickyness” on mobile. One question this raises to me is: how does Facebook usage compare to other activities on mobile such as time spend in mobile email or text messaging?
New Facebook Phones from HTC
Mobile World Congress is the event grabbing all the headlines in most tech blogs this week. While Android phones and tablets are catching most people’s eyes, the social networking world should hone in on two devices from Android phone maker HTC. The powerhouse in mobile phones has released two phones with a distinctive feature: A dedicated Facebook button prominently placed on the front of the devices.
The HTC ChaCha and Salsa are the first social phones with a Facebook button on the front. The Facebook button launches an app that allows you to update your status, share web links and post the music you’re listening to. The ChaCha is an all-touchscreen phone with a 3.4″ display, a 5-megapixel camera. GPS and Wi-Fi. The Salsa has a full QWERTY keyboard for those most interested in messaging. Both phones will be available in the coming months.