How long do you take to reach your phone?

Do you reach your smartphone when you wake up? Do you find yourself constantly going over your monthly phone data allowance and paying extra in fees? According to Deloitte's 2017 Mobile Consumer Survey, you are not alone. Deloitte has just completed the annual global survey of 53,000 smartphone users across 33 countries. 2,000 people from Australia, aged between 8 and 75 also participated in the study.

Source: Creative Commons

The study found 43 per cent of Australians "fairly often" or "very often" exceed their data allowance.

Based on the time of the survey, Australia's smartphone ownership numbers were behind only Norway, Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg — who have all broken through the 90 per cent adoption level.

However, Australians are increasingly frustrated by their phone contracts, with a 47 per cent increase in new complaints specific to mobile phone services filed with the Telecommunications Ombudsman in the last financial year.

So, what did the global survey reveal about Australians when it comes to Smartphones?

Australia remains one of the leading global adopters of the smartphone and 88 percent of Australians now own one, with market growth being driven by older generations.
It’s all about content; the number of Australians streaming TV and video and watching live TV on our smartphones has tripled since last year. 4G networks and bigger data packages are enabling this constant consumption – but not sufficiently. Forty- three percent of consumers regularly exceed their data limits, and it’s costing close to $313m per year for extra data.
Australians are consuming mobile data everywhere and almost all the time. Thirty-five percent of Australians check their phone within five minutes of waking up in the morning, with 70 percent using phones during mealtimes with family and friends.
Machine learning is making phones smarter, but the Australians are not paying much attention to that yet. Awareness of virtual assistants such as Siri is good (43 percent.) However, usage of that is only 14 percent.
The use of fingerprint authentication on smartphones has surged, with a 35 percent rise from 2016.
Mobile payment technologies are becoming increasingly available and easier payment has enabled significant growth (25 percent) in mobile purchasing.