Cellphone Survey

A recent post on this blog linked to some interesting stats:

Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent).
1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration)

In areas like North America where traditional telephone research is a hefty percentage of the data collection that gets done, researchers might have a heart attack for the implications on their sampling plans! It's tempting to think that maybe moving to cellphone survey are just around the corner to relieve our response rate woes!

Being at a company that specializes in wireless surveys, we're in a very exciting time. But I also have to have a dose of realism - Not all phones are created equal.

In this story about Smartphone viruses, I learned that Smartphones currently make up about five per cent of the total mobile market, and the most popular smartphone operating system, Symbian, has 64.3 per cent of the smartphone market (3.2 per cent of the entire mobile market).

The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring with the

entry of WebOs, Android and the like. But have you ever browsed the mobile web on anything other than a Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone or Blackberry? It's miserable. My Samsung SPH-a920 is awesome - I'd recommend it to anyone, as long as you don't brwose the mobile web.

Setting aside connectivity problems for a moment, and just thinking about the hardware people own, wide acceptance of a mobile phone survey via the mobile web is probably further away than we would like to admit. Perhaps survey applications, text msg surveys and IVR will be our best options for doing a cellular survey in the short to mid term.