NEW DELHI: Indians’ dependence on smartphones for productivity rose 120% during April-May when compared to levels before the coronavirus outbreak. Content creation and sharing, and collaboration accounted for most of the work related activity on smartphones, a CyberMedia Research (CMR) survey titled, Mobile Industry Consumer Insights (MICI), said.
As lockdown lifted and sales of non essentials resumed, many people upgraded to laptops and the dependence on smartphones for work reduced. According to CMR, in June, the use of smartphones for productivity rose only 40% as compared to pre-covid 19 months.
“As a Black Swan event, the users were not really prepared for the lockdown, and had to depend on their smartphones to tide over. From a work-productivity perspective, the focus was on content creation, content sharing and collaboration,” said Prabhu Ram, head-Industry Intelligence Group, CMR.
Ram added that work on smartphones was mostly done via business and team calls, and enabled through apps such as Zoom. Content creation and sharing was enabled through MS Office suite, and apps such as Dropbox, CamScanner, and Docs Converter, for converting and sharing documents.
Overall smartphone usage increased 50% in April-May. During this time, 84% of users turned to smartphones to find more about various government schemes, get weather updates and market related information on agricultural produce. Around 83% of users relied on their smartphone for creating and consuming short-form videos, music and videos.
The report also said that productivity will play an important role in buying of smartphones going ahead.
Around 58% users reported overheating issues in their existing smartphones, 47% found screen size a major limitation from a work perspective and 46% were disappointed with the battery backup.
As a result, 54% participants said they will buy smartphones which offer longer battery backup while 53% will buy phones with large screens for work and entertainment.
The survey was conducted by CMR in association with Tecno Mobile and covered user behaviour in Tier-I, Tier-II and Tier-III cities before covid-19, during pandemic, and neo normal (June onwards).
CMR interviewed 1052 professionals in the age group of 20-35 years located in ten cities including, New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Ludhiana, Lucknow, Surat, Indore, Guwahati and Sonipat.
