According to statistics released by analytics and payment network Bango, BlackBerry users in the US now browse the internet more outside of main business hours. The stats show that, 6am to 8am and 6pm to 8pm are the busiest times for mobile web access.
Contrary to the traditional view that BlackBerry owners use the device primarily for email and core business activities, the Bango analysis indicates a strong appetite for web browsing, which is happening more frequently outside normal business hours. Bango’s analysis also reveals that the BlackBerry user is as likely as any other phone user to browse non-business related sites, with games, media and entertainment among the most popular sites visited.
This new report reveals the extent to which the BlackBerry has become a dependable browsing device for all activities at all times of the day. BlackBerry users turn to their phones for browsing 7 days of the week, with Saturday and Sunday browsing starting about 2 hours later.
“Bango’s data shows that the BlackBerry is being widely used to browse all kinds of web content, breaking the ‘business only’ stereotype”, said Anil Malhotra, SVP Marketing & Alliances of Bango. “Our time-of-day analysis reveals that BlackBerry web browsing is just as commonplace on the morning commute, during cocktail hour or at the weekend.”
Bango collected the data from millions of BlackBerry users in the US, during March 2010, through its mobile payments and analytics platform. In addition to the browsing activity extending beyond workplace hours and activities, the data reveals that weekends are also popular days for BlackBerry users to browse the internet, further supporting the view that it is as widely used as other smartphones for general web browsing.
We’d love to see some UK figures for this, but we’d predict that the UK usage is going to be very much the same. A quick straw poll of commuters in the Business Mobile office came up with the startling comment “My train is full of people surgically attached to their devices, well they’re not called crackberrys for nothing.”