Average UK adult spends 3.9 years of their entire life using a mobile phone. At a guess

There are surveys covering all manner of topics, many of which have been commissioned purely by companies hoping to grab some headlines for their products and services. Take this new survey from MobileInsurance, some UK mobile phone insurer I’ve never heard of (since I've never insured a phone in my life -- that's partly what my home contents insurance is for).

The firm apparently asked 2,314 mobile phone users aged 18 or over from around the UK just how long they spend on their phones every day. That’s phoning people, sending texts, using apps and playing games. And they received an answer of 90 minutes a day, which works out to 32,850 minutes a year, or 22.8 days, or -- if you want the ultimate figure -- 3.9 years of your entire average adult lifespan. That’s a lot of time spent playing with your phone. And all complete rubbish of course.

For starters, do you know how long you spend on your phone? No. You could guess a figure, which I suspect is what pretty much all of the responders have done. I personally have no idea, at all, how long I spend on my phone on average. Since I also use an iPod touch for notifications, and an iPad for other tasks, it makes it very hard to say exactly how much time I spend looking at all the different screens combined, let alone what the figure is broken down by device. So that estimate of 90 minutes a day might be right, it could be entirely wrong. You don’t need to survey over 2,000 people to get that figure, you could just make it up yourself.

It depends on the day, on your situation, on your age, on your device -- even on your provider. I once spent over an hour just trying to access a website from a place with hardly any signal. I know it's an average figure they're claiming, but I'm not sure I could actually even begin to guess that with any degree of accuracy. It could be anything. 90 minutes, 180 minutes, 30 minutes. No clue.

Jason Brockman, Director of MobileInsurance.co.uk, said: "I was amazed to see how much we use our mobile phones over the course of a year and even our whole adult lifetime. To see that we text, call, browse the net, use apps, take pictures and more for almost 4 years in our lifetime is astounding".

No it isn’t Jason. You do anything for any length of time -- like eating, sleeping, having sex, watching TV -- it all adds up. If you spend five minutes a week looking for lost car keys that alone totals 11 days of your life wasted.

The survey did bring up some marginally more interesting results though. When asked what they most used their phones for, the recipients stated the following:

• Browsing the internet -- 24%
• Sending texts -- 21%
• Making phone calls -- 17%
• Using apps -- 15%
• Emails -- 13%
• Taking pictures -- 6%
• Other -- 4%

If anything I’m surprised that making phone calls rated so highly. I'd have thought apps would be higher too, but it depends on what type of phones the people surveyed actually own.

Do you know how long you spend on your phone on a daily basis, and what do you mostly use it for?

Photo Credit: Adam Radosavljevic/