This is a short summary or overview I wrote after reading a conference paper from the ACM Digital Library. The original paper can be found here: Click here
Diversity in Smartphone Usage
Experimental Setup
A study was conducted to analyse the variation in smartphone use across a variety of users. Detailed usage traces were collected from 255 users, grouped into two datasets.
Dataset 1 – Consisted of 33 Android users out of which 17 were research workers and 16 were students. A custom logging utility was deployed on HTC Dream smartphones with unlimited plans. The logger collected detailed data such as the state of the screen, start and end times of calls, application interaction time, network traffic, and battery level. 7-21 weeks of data was gathered per user, with the average being 9 weeks. The logger ran in the background, keeping data records in a local SQLite database on the phone, and uploading them only when the phone was being charged.
Dataset 2 – Consisted of 222 Windows Mobile users across different demographic and geographic locations. The demographic categories were: SC (social communicators; required voice and text), LPU (life power users; needed a multi-function device), BPU (business power users; needed advanced phone for business), OP (organiser practicals; needed a simple device for management). 8-28 weeks of data was gathered per user by a third party, with the average being 16 weeks. Traces were collected using a logger that recorded start and end times of applications using API calls.
