The United Arab Emirates leads the world in smartphone penetration, with 74% of mobile subscribers. Nearly three out of four people in the United Arab Emirates owns a smartphone, making it the country with the highest smartphone penetration in the world. Following the UAE are South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
The United States doesn’t even fall into the top 10, finishing at No. 13 with just 56.4% penetration, according to Google’s Our Mobile Planet report from Q1 of 2013.
Statista’s chart, below, shows the 15 countries with the highest smartphone penetration in the world.
The survey this data comes from was carried out earlier this year as part of a global ‘deep dive’ by from a sample of 500 mobile users surveyed online, contains some remarkable insights into the behavior of the UAE’s smartphone-toting consumer. 73% of users had prepaid packages out of which 85% of users said they connected via Wi-Fi rather than the public network. However, people in UAE are aggressive online – some 77% of smartphone users surveyed accessed the internet at least daily and 66% multiple times per day. In all, 56% of users had used the Internet on their smartphones every day in the past week.
The most popular uses for the devices was browsing the Internet (76%), email (74%), sharing a photo or video (77%) and accessing social networks (70%).
43% of those surveyed had two mobiles – a figure that’s down from last year, when Google found this figure to be at 53%. Is this a sign of mobile fatigue in terms of preferences?
46% of those surveyed had ten or more apps installed on their smartphones – and over 80% used mobile apps every day. However the debate continues as to how many people access all apps on their smartphones?
I am surprised that the post by @AlexanderMcNabb is not acknowledged, bearing in mind he was the first to break this news within GCC. http://www.spotonpr.com/uae-is-world-smartphoneleader/
Meanwhile in the connected world beyond Arabia, Mashable initially carried the story, which was copied through http://rupertbumfrey.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-15-countries-with-highest.html
My point is this highlights how slow the region is to actually pick up on stories, possibly more attention should be paid beyond the navel-gazing!