Bursting at the seams with mobile devices
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations ManagerIn the 90s I carried three devices – a laptop, a mobile phone and a pager. A pager you ask? Well the battery life on my mobile phone wasn’t great, and if you wanted to reach me right away you could page me. It was also in the era before texting, and the pager was the original one purpose texting device of choice.
In the Q1 2011 Mobile Workforce Report we found that the average mobile worker was carrying 2.68 devices for work. At the time, I thought that was a lot … But just last month we found that the number had expanded to 3.47 devices. We are bursting at the seams with mobile devices!
Do we really need three and a half devices to get our jobs done, or is it more to balance our lives? Today I have a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet. The laptop and smartphone are my core work devices; and the tablet is my “occasional” work device. I get to use it anytime I can pull it out of my kids’ hands. Sticky hands I should say … My mistake for letting them download Angry Birds.
But honestly, I can see three devices, but where are the extra .47 devices coming from? Here is the chart of what mobile workers reported:
| How many of each mobile device do you personally use for work? | ||
| 2012 | 2011 | |
| Tablets | .54 | 0.27 |
| Laptops/Notebooks | 1.32 | 1.01 |
| Smartphones | 1.05 | 0.97 |
| Mobile phones | .37 | 0.32 |
| Netbooks/Ultra | .12 | 0.11 |
| Other | .07 | |
| Average | 3.47 | 2.68 |
It appears that the growth not only happened with tablets, but also on the laptop front. We think the dual laptop growth is because people need a larger laptop with a bigger monitor for the office; and a tiny laptop for travel. I personally hate traveling with a lot of heavy equipment.
It looks like the day ruled by “the one” device will never come, even with the arrival of all these fancy crave worthy devices. This trinity (quartet?) of Internet-capable devices is what we call the mobile stack. The new unit of computing includes the laptop, the smartphone, and now the tablet. The implications for enterprise IT departments are immediate: support needs have grown as many IT departments see employees using their own mobile devices to access secure documents and networks. Finance departments are also increasingly feeling the pain, with rising telecom costs on expense reports, from 3G roaming to expensive hotel Wi-Fi day passes, which often do not appear as budget line items.
Are you carrying a lot of mobile devices? Are you checking them at all hours of the day? We want to know. Take our Q2 Mobile Workforce survey, and you might even win yet another device… the new iPad.
Tags: mobile device, mobile employee, mobile workforce, survey, tablet
