Today we'll talk about the owner of various mobile devices in the metro and their use cases.
In every profession, some kind of 'occupational disease' appears over time, and observers are no exception. Here's a harmless example of such a deviation: I step into a subway car, walk through it completely and pay attention to every smartphone, tablet, or e-book that other passengers use. Here is a girl reading VKontakte with her Nokia Lumia, a guy playing Bejeweled with a Galaxy S3, and that grandfather over there is reading a book from a brand new iPad Air wrapped in a case. In this column, I decided to share a few observations of passengers on the subway. For your convenience, the article will be divided by type of gadget.
Smartphone on Android
The main use case Android – smartphones in the metro – reading. I regularly see young people reading, less often girls, all of them have smartphones on Android. In principle, you can understand them, five inches diagonal, high resolution, fits in your pocket. I myself used to read often from my smartphone.
Another less common option is watching videos. Usually they watch some kind of TV series. I've seen anime watchers a couple of times.
Games on Android are rarely played, but social networks are used from time to time, most often it is VKontakte.
Apple iPhone
With iPhone everything is simple. They mainly listen to music from it. In those awful EarPods that make all the neighbors aware of their musical preferences. Very rarely saw the user iPhone with other headphones.
But on social networks, the owners of iPhone sit more often than their neighbors with Android – smartphones.
When it comes to gaming, video, and reading, these use cases are largely unclaimed.
Windows Phone
You know, surprisingly, WP machines are also encountered periodically. As a rule, people read from them on social networks. If we talk about brands, then most often I see Nokia naturally.
iPad
Surprisingly, iPad is the most popular tablet on the subway. There are not so many of them as iPhone, but one or two owners are guaranteed to be in the carriage, especially if you are traveling during rush hour. As you might have guessed, most of them read from a tablet. The built-in iBooks are mainly used as an application. If we talk about sizes, then large ten-inch ones iPad prevail, and iPad Mini are very rare, usually among girls.
Occasionally I see people playing on iPad. The most popular game is playing solitaire. In general, it is certainly very funny to buy a device for 30,000 rubles to play solitaire.
The rest of the scenarios are so rare that they are rather the exception to the rule.
Android – tablets
But from Android – tablets, the most popular are cheap seven-inch models from B-brands. Or 'like e-books' with a TN-matrix. As with iPad, people mostly read from them, less often – watch videos.
EBook
I always pay attention to the owners of e-books. Here sits a woman in her fifties reading from Amazon Kindle 5. A smile involuntarily appears on my face. I understand that she herself would hardly have dealt with it, so this book was bought for her by caring children or grandchildren, wanting to introduce mother / grandmother to new technologies. They know the Kindle is inexpensive, but good quality. Honestly, I'm always very happy when I see people of the age with the Kindle.
In general, according to my observations, the share of Kindle in the subway is about 50%. That is, they read either from it or from some inexpensive reader like Digma / TeXet. I also periodically see the owners of PocketBook. By the way, tiny five-inch readers are especially popular.
Conclusion
Using the metro as an example, it is very interesting to observe trends in the mobile world. Five or six years ago the most popular ringtone was Nokia Tune. But for three or four years now I mainly hear Over the Horizon from Samsung or built-in melodies from iPhone. The same applies to SMS messages. By the way, here's a great video on the evolution of the Over the Horizon melody (by the way, I really like it):
It was also funny to note that tablet owners buy either expensive iPad or the cheapest Android tablets. Mid-range devices are not that common.