Here's What People Are Doing On Their Smartphones And Tablets

These charts are from the new Future of Mobile slide deck. The deck was produced by Henry Blodget and the team at BI Intelligence, a research and analysis service focused on mobile computing and the Internet. Please check out the full Future of Mobile deck here. All of the charts and data in the report are available for download from the BI Intelligence library.

People are using smartphones to do things.

Lot of things.

A chart from BI Intelligence's new Future Of Mobile deck breaks the activity down:

It's interesting to note how smartphone behavior differs from tablet behavior:

So, what are some key behaviors - aside from gaming and content consumption?

Well, mobile commerce is exploding. It now makes up 20% of overall ecommerce activities, as seen below:

29% of U.S. mobile users already have used their smartphones to make a purchase,
and Bank of America expects that there will be $67 billion in revenue from smartphone and tablet retail purchasing by European and U.S. shoppers in 2015

Also, people are increasingly using their phones to make mobile payments. The below graph shows the amount of mobile payments processed by Paypal from 2008 until 2012. The number now sits at nearly $14 billion:

According to BI Intelligence analyst Marcelo Ballvé, "mobile payments are not so much about the act of effecting a 'wallet-less' payment via a mobile device, but about the extra value such an app can create as a direct link between brands and consumers." The explosion of mobile payments can, therefore, have profound effects on consumer behavior.

To read more about The Future of Mobile, check out BI Intelligence's new slide deck here.