Abstract

Smart phones are seen to drive the development of mobile applications and a more or less intuitive belief is that once the users have a smart phone they will download applications and start using a wider variety of mobile services and/or more advanced mobile services. In this paper we describe Finnish smart phone users based on a survey study carried out with a random sample representative of Finnish consumers between the ages of 16 and 64. We divide smart phone users into three categories based on the range and frequency of using different mobile services and applications. We find, in addition to a small ‘power user’ group (15 %) and a substantial set of ‘interested but inactive users’ (47 %), that 38 % of smart phone users do not use their devices for any advanced services and have a low motivation to continue using smart phones in the future. The demand for and the sales of smart phones is growing rapidly; combined with this is the notion that users of smart phones will become users of more advanced applications and a wider variety of services, which will give a boost to the mobile service market. In light of our results we believe this development is slower to happen than expected. Also noteworthy is the sizeable minority of decidedly underwhelmed smart phone users, who are likely to jump ship to simpler devices.

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