A recent report from Ofcom has shown that us Brits would rather use our phones to text than talk!

The average UK consumer now sends 50 texts per week – which has more than doubled in four years – with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011. Teenagers and young adults are mostly leading these changes, increasingly socialising with friends and family online and through text messages despite saying they prefer to talk face to face.

According to Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2012, 96% of 16-24s are using some form of text based application on a daily basis to communicate with friends and family; with 90% using texts and nearly three quarters (73%) using social networking sites.

Four in ten (39%) adults now own a smartphone, a 12 percentage point increase on 2010. Forty-two per cent of these now say that their smartphone is the most important device for accessing the internet, with over four in ten (42%) regularly using social networking sites and half (51%) using e-mail.

Smartphones are changing people’s shopping habits, encouraging online bargain hunting – or Robo (Research offline buy online) shopping.
Over half of smartphone users claim to use their phone in some way when out shopping.
This includes taking photos of products (31%), making online price comparisons (25%), scanning bar codes to get more product information (21%), reading product reviews online (19%) and researching product features (19%).

You can read the full 2012 Marketing report here