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Innovation

Google says six countries have pushed smartphone adoption over 50%

Google says that six countries now have smartphone adoption rates above 50%. And they're probably not who you think.
Written by Mari Silbey, Contributor

Google’s got data. And this time it shows that the top six countries ranked by smartphone adoption may not be the ones you’d guess. According to Google’s latest study, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), Sweden, Norway, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) all boast smartphone adoption rates above 50%. There are seven countries that follow not far behind with adoption rates over 40%. They include the United States, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.

The new research has me wondering a little about the Asia Pacific region and why it doesn’t have higher adoption numbers, but the study does point out that people who own smartphones in China and Japan are typically heavy users. Sixty eight percent of smartphone owners in China search for information on their mobile devices daily. And Japanese owners are known to multitask with their phones regularly. The Google study found that 80% of Japanese use their devices while consuming other media, including 53% who use their phones while watching TV, and 30% who do so while accessing the Internet on a computer.

If you want to do your own visualization of Google’s new data, the company has also fed the results from its latest study into a chart-making tool it introduced last fall. Here’s a chart I created showing the length of daily online sessions among smartphone owners in China and Japan.

Google’s full data sets are also available online, as well as country-specific summary reports.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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