For the past two weeks, I was on holiday with little access to the Internet. It wasn’t that I'd gone to the ends of the earth; I was, in fact, traveling through the South of England, but we just didn’t come across many places that had Wi-Fi access. During our holiday, I also started to notice that the Brits have a more restrained way of using their mobile phones in public. While I’m used to seeing people around me in the Netherlands checking their mobile whenever and wherever, I hardly saw anyone in the UK browsing on their mobile when in the company of others.

When I commented on this to my colleagues after my return, they attributed it to my rosy outlook due to my time off. So I looked at Forrester’s Technographics® data to compare US and UK smartphone users’ behaviors. Smartphone ownership in the UK isn’t that far behind that of the US: Our recent Forrester Research World Mobile Adoption Forecast, 2013 To 2018 (Global) shows that about 61% of US mobile subscribers use the mobile Internet compared with 49% of their UK peers — and we expect these numbers to grow to 75% and 70%, respectively, in 2018. More striking is our 2013 data that shows that usage of smartphones at home is comparable in both countries — but it’s the usage at restaurants and coffee shops that really differs: 

In the UK, using a mobile in public or while communicating to others recently resulted in a public debate after an incident where check-out worker refused to serve a woman who was chatting on her mobile phone. I’m curious about your opinion. Personally, I found the Brits attitude towards mobile etiquette very refreshing but again, that could have been my holiday state of mind.