In March of this year we conducted a survey among the TU Delft students about their mobile phone and usage of it. Due to busy times with Blackboard and OpenCourseWare I still had to finish the processing of the results. Today I finally did ;-)

The most important results are:

• More than 80% of our students use a smart phone. That’s 20% increase in a little more than 1 year.
• HTC is the most popular phone brand, closely followed by Apple
• Android is the most used platform for smart phones, followed by Apple iOS. There is a significant increase of Android and decrease of Windows since 2009
• 22% of the respondents have another mobile device, most popular is the tablet
• More than 60% of respondents access Blackboard on their phone, but you see big difference between the platforms
• iOS-users use more features of their phone, especially listening to music, watching video and social networking
• T-Mobile is the most used provider
• 47% of the respondents have Eduroam (wifi-network on campus) configured on their phone.
• 46% of the iPhone users have installed the iTU Delft app

...

In december 2009 I did this mobile survey for the first time. In March 2011 I did it for the second time. Below I have the results of this year and I compare them withe the results of 2009. We added some new questions, so those questions we couldn't compare.

Smart phones

In March 2011 the smart phone pentration is already up to 81% as you can see in the image below (you can click on all the image to see it full screen). That is an increase of 20% in less then one and a half year. So if this trend continues next year we can assume that all our students have smart phone. For laptops this is already the case.

Brand of phone

Overall and only smart phones HTC is the most used brand of phone. Closely followed by Apple. Stunning is the decrease of Nokia. In 2009 they had a share of 29% of alle phones and 21% of the smart phones.Now they only score a little bit above the 10%. Blackberry has increased its share from 4% to 8%, that is an increase of 100%.

Platform of the smart phone

In 2009 Apple was market leader followed by Windows. Definitely there happened something here. Android is now market leader and Apple is second. Windows lost allmost all their market here. They decreased from 25% to 6%. It will be interesting to see what happens next year, now Nokia dropped Symbian and will release smart phones with Windows Mobile 7.

For the TU Delft it means that we will focus on Android and iOS as mobile platforms.

Other devices

This year we also asked if the students have other mobile devices. 22% of the students have another mobile device. Interesting is that there isn't a correlation with the posession of a smart phone.

In the question we defined a mobile device as a device with internet access via 3G or wifi. The tablet, MP3-player and netbook were the most populair. Interesting to see is that master students have more tablets and netbooks then bachelor students. Bachelor students prefer a MP3-player

Blackboard

Since last year we have a license for Blackboard Mobile Learn. This means that students can download an app to access our Blackboard system. The app is available for iOS, Android, Blackberry and WebOS (for Palm). In the image below you see that still a lot of users use the mobile browser instead of the app. The iOS-users are most active mobile blackboard users, but Android users are most active with the blackboard mobile app.

Usage of the smart phone

As expected calling and texting is still the most used feature of a smart phone. More than 12 activities score a percentage higher then 60%. Something that dramatically increased is the usage of the agenda. In 2009 this scored less then 10% and now it is up to 75%. I assume that the easy set-up for Exchange and Gmail on most phone has something to do with this.

Something that surprised me was the usage of eBooks, 58% of smart phone users indicated that they use this.

In the image on the right I compared the two most used platforms and you can see that iOS-users are more active on their phone.

Provider

T-mobile is still the most used provider, but their lead is not as big as in 2009. In 2009 more then half of the phones had a T-Mobile subscription. Interesting is the increase of Hi/KPN, in 2009 only 5% of the users had a Hi/KPN-subscription and now 24% of all phones and 29% of the smart phones.

Eduroam

Eduroam is the wifi network on campus. In 2009 a lot of phones had problems with the 802.11x-encryption. This year the most users with Android and iOS smart phones have succesfully set it up. The users with Symbian definitely have a problem with Eduroam. Work to be done!

iTU Delft app

The iTU Delft app is the campus app for TU Delft. It is available for iPhone and Android. We will release a new version soon with lots of new features, that will definitely increase the usage.

The biggest problem is that a lot of users don't know the app and that is offcourse a pitty. 46% of the iPhone users have installed the app.

The results of this survey will be used in the further development of the TU Delft mobile activities. In the new 'ICTO-plan' we focus on two parts:

• campus information, such as the iTU Delft app
• mobile learning