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The Korea Information Society Development Institute said in a report that Koreans spent an average of 66 minutes a day using their smartphones last year, up 43 percent from a year earlier.
The amount of time spent on desktop PCs was 61 minutes; the first time smartphones overtook PCs in daily usage in Korea.
The report was based on a survey by a local agency called Korea Media Panel Research that was conducted on around 10,000 people across the country. Two thirds of the respondents, 66.2 percent, said they had at least one smartphone, the report showed, up from 49.3 percent last year.
Users spent most of the time on their smartphone making or receiving phone calls, but that portion dropped from 44.2 percent in 2012 to 34.7 percent this year.
The second-largest amount of time was spent on text messaging and messenger services, with its percentage nearly doubling to 26.2 percent from 14.8 percent in 2012. Due to the popularity of messenger services like KakaoTalk, text messaging through telecommunications providers plummeted from 19.7 percent to 7.3 percent.
The time spent on playing games rose sharply from 2.9 percent to 7.6 percent, while online searches jumped from 4.3 percent to 7.3 percent.
This year, a category of simultaneous media use was added to the survey, which showed that people spent an average of 14 minutes using smartphones while watching TV, and seven minutes on their smartphones while also using desktop PCs.
A total of 37.2 percent of respondents had a long-term evolution (LTE) or 4G smartphone, confirming the fast growth of high-speed broadband connections.
Last year, only 11.5 percent of smartphone users were LTE subscribers.
The proportion of second-generation mobile phones dropped from 12.3 percent to 8.6 percent - not as quick of a drop as the use of third-generation phones, which fell from 33.4 percent to 19.3 percent.
BY MOON GWANG-LIP [joe@joongang.co.kr]
