Mobile usage

Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn’t even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here’s what I use my phone for:

• Clock. I don’t wear a watch, so I look at my phone all the time to check the time.
• Taking pictures + sending them to Flickr.
• Voice. I dislike talking on the phone, but when you gotta, you gotta.
• Text messaging. Texting is preferable to voice in many instances and many friends text more often than they call nowadays.
• Taking pictures. I think of this as distinct from the photo + Flickr usage above. The camera on my phone just isn’t that important to me without the ability to easily publish them to the Web.

Stuff I don’t want on my phone:

• Music. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of cramming a music player into a phone. The user experience needs to be solved first.
• Email. I still use client-side spam filtering so reading my mail on a phone would be a painful exercise. And I can send email from my phone and that’s enough…I can handle not reading my email for hours on end.
• Web browsing. I love the Web, but my preferred portable device for accessing it is my laptop. Not worth the extra expense of adding it to my service plan.

What’s your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.

• mobile phones
• telephony