What would you miss?

Every year Ofcom, the UK's media and telecoms regulator, produces a communications market report full of interesting data. I've picked a few of the more interesting charts related to mobile here. 

First, smartphones are mainstream - two thirds of the UK adult population and 90% of 16-24 year olds have one. 

As a natural result of this, smartphones are now the single most important device to connect to the internet, overtaking laptops. If you add smartphones and tablets together you get to over 50%. 

Unsurprisingly, that's strongest for younger people. 

Interestingly, if you split this by demographic then you see that smartphones are important for the young, again, but also for the poorest parts of society. Remember when people claimed smartphones were toys for the rich? They're a lot more accessible than PCs. 

These devices aren't just important for the internet - they're the things people would miss most. 

The shift to smartphones is accompanied by an obvious decline in SMS use as people move to messaging apps. 

Mostly, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Facebook (yes, this conflates desktop and mobile, but that's not a big issue). 

However, though everyone has Facebook, the majority of Facebook users also use at least one other app. 

Meanwhile, voice calling is also trending down. Some of that is the shift to mobile from fixed, and some of it is VOIP, but I suspect it's also that messaging is often better than phone calls. Maybe people don't want to talk. 

Hence, not that many people are actually using VOIP on their mobile phones (as opposed to on PCs). 

Finally, another interesting but not surprising chart: for VOIP, Skype is falling fast and WhatsApp is big - but Facetime is almost as big. And, Hangouts is nowhere.