In India, feature phone sales are on decline and Smartphones are getting uber popular, especially with prices of Smartphones coming down drastically over past couple of years. You can now get a decent Android smartphone for around Rs. 5000, which makes it easily affordable for large cross-section of Indian consumers.
With growth in smartphones, the usage patterns have obviously changed – According to a survey conducted by Nielsen and Informate Mobile Intelligence of around 10,000 Indian consumers between Sept 2012 to Oct 2012 pointed out that voice and text communication via smartphone in India is declining. In fact, voice calls and texting accounted for only 25 percent of smartphone usage. Audio & Video content, games, apps and Internet browsing made up the rest of the usage.
Playing games on smartphones came out to be the most popular category with nearly 3 out of 5 users playing games on their smartphones, followed by Chat/IM (53%) and streaming music (48%).
Smartphone OSes of Choice
Android was overwhelmingly favorite when it came to preference of Smartphone choice with nearly 62 percent showing their ownership towards it. It clearly shows that Indians are a price-conscious lot and prefer open Smartphones OSes.
Only 1 out of 5 showed their allegiance towards Symbian Operating system. iOS was least favourite with less than 1 percent smartphone consumers preferring it (Sky-high prices are probably the reason behind such a low number)
Tablet Ownership
Low cost tablets are getting launched by hundreds now in India, and it is for a reason. While only 2 percent of people surveyed last year said that they would buy a tablet. This number has spiked over 5 times this year, with nearly 11 percent showing interest in buying a tablet in near future.
This is definitely a surprising finding of the survey – It says, only half of the smartphone users polled have active data access and majority of the users who have the data access are the younger lot!
