iPhones are for girls, Android is for good honest folk

If you’re reading this on your iPhone, chances are you’re a woman. If you’re reading this on your Android device, chances are you’re a humble and honest mature gentleman.

Disregarding the incendiary headline for one moment, the research comes from Lancaster University’s Lecturer in Computational Social Science, David Ellis. The research is based on a study of 500 smartphone users who were asked a series of questionnaires about their attitude towards their mobile phone.

According to the University of Lancaster, four in every five UK adults now owns a smartphone, so the sample size of 500 should, in theory, be fairly reflective of consumer attitudes.

So, on to the results, the interesting bit.

The profile of your bog standard, run-of-the-mill iPhone user is:

Meanwhile, the bog standard, run-of-the-mill Android user is:

The only downside to the report is a lack of socioeconomic profile, considering iPhone and iOS are considered premium products which are priced accordingly. So by tapping into iPhone users, you’re already assuming a certain level of affluence, which usually hints towards a certain mind set already. We say “usually” because obviously not everyone is the same, and we’ll be damned if we tar everyone with the same brush.

To get clarity on this matter, we looked to get in touch with the author of the paper, Dr David Ellis, but unfortunately he wasn’t available for comment at the time of writing. However, his co-lead on the project, Heather Shaw from University of Lincoln, did provide this canned comment when announcing the research.

“It is becoming more and more apparent that smartphones are becoming a mini digital version of the user, and many of us don’t like it when other people attempt to use our phones because it can reveal so much about us.”

So there you have it, most of us love our phones just the way they are, whether they’re a subconscious extension of our psyche or not.

Oh, and before anyone starts whinging, the study said nothing about Windows Mobile, because literally (not literally) nobody uses Windows Mobile.