Nokia leads the mobile pack

New Delhi: The new government led by Dr Manmohan Singh may not be able to pull 30 percent of the billion plus Indians above the poverty line but he could certainly offer a billion mobile connections to Indians by 2014, according to the forecasts by Department of Telecommunications.

Nokia emerged as the most preferred brand for mobile handsets, followed by Sony Ericsson, according to a survey conducted by Living Digital (LD), throwing light on the future of the Indian mobile telephony.

To understand this burgeoning telecom market and the user preferences, LD conducted an online survey of over 1,000 mobile users across 150 Indian cities, and analyzed future purchase patterns, which handset manufacturers customers rely on and mobile usage patterns across the country.

About 40 percent of the respondents had Airtel as a service provider followed by 27 percent subscribers from Vodafone. Idea, Reliance, Aircel and Tata Indicom subscribers added up to 15 percent of the respondents. The public sector service providers MTNL and BSNL's subscribers participating in the survey added up to 13 percent.

Nearly three-fourths of the respondents were satisfied with their mobile service providers, while 19 percent were just about satisfied. The real issue was with eight percent of the subscribers who were not so satisfied or not at all satisfied.

Handset preferences

The survey revealed that more than half the respondents owned a Nokia handset followed by Sony Ericsson at a distant second with 16 percent respondents owning it. Motorola was at seven percent followed by HTC at five percent, and Samsung, LG and other brands like Apple, Blackberry, Asus, Spice, Fly, etc made up rest of the pie.

More than one-third of the respondents were completely satisfied with their current mobile phones while one-fifth were not too happy with the current handsets, indicating that they may look for a change in the future.

Half the respondents said that they will buy a Nokia phone in the future as it provided good value for money. Only eight percent of the respondents who already owned a Nokia mobile said that they were likely to switch to another brand.

Sony-Ericsson was the next brand for future purchase with great multimedia capabilities and value for money offer.

According to the survey, 85 percent of the respondents stressed on features and functionality to be extremely important, while only 42 percent felt that looks and styles were extremely important.

A majority of the respondents changed their mobile phone once every two years, while 28 percent changed once a year.

Almost half the respondents were willing to shell out between Rs 10,000 to 30,000 for a new handset. For another 11 percent of the respondents, price didn't matter as long as they found what they liked.

SMS-most popular mobile application

SMS was one of the most popular mobile application with an overwhelming 92 percent respondents using it. Over half the respondents used their mobile phones for listening to music, taking photos, surfing the Internet from their mobiles, and playing games. Slightly less than half engaged in work related tasks like using the mobile phone to access the Internet from a laptop, checking e-mails, managing meetings, appointments and other work.

About 18 percent of respondents also used GPS or location-based services and accessed social networking sites on the phone. They also used it for making payments, searches, trying new software, reading eBooks, PDFs and MS Office files.

Service provider preferences

Most of the mobile users were apprehensive about changing their service providers as they would have to change their number too. About two-fifth of the respondents said that if they would change their current service provider if they were allowed to retain their current mobile number.