No consumer product in history has caught on as quickly as the mobile phone, global sales of which have risen from six million in 1991 to more than 400 million a year now. The arrival of the mobile phone has transformed our lifestyles so much that men now spend more time on the phone than women, according to the results of our special opinion poll.

Mobile phones are no longer just the domain of the teenager and, in fact, just as many 40- and 50-somethings now own a mobile phone as the 15 to 20 age group (slightly below 70%). Even among the over 65s more than 40% now have a mobile.

The survey found that men with mobile phones (72% of all men) spend more than an hour a day making calls on average weekday. The average man spends sixty-six minutes on his landline or his mobile, compared with fifty-three minutes before the mobile phone revolution. But the poll reveals that, while men are using their phones a lot more, women are actually spending less time on the phone. Slightly fewer women (67%) have a mobile phone, and the survey shows that the average amount of time they spend on the phone on a weekday has gone down from sixty-three minutes before they got a mobile to fifty-five minutes now. The explanation might lie in the fact that men love to play with techno toys while women may be more conscious of the bills they are running up.

Innovation in mobile phones has been happening so fast that it’s difficult for consumers to change their behavior. Phones are constantly swallowing up other products like cameras, calculators, clocks, radios, and digital music players. There are twenty different products that previously might have been bought separately that can now be part of a mobile phone. Mobiles have changed the way people talk to one another, they have generated a new type of language, they have saved lives and become style icons.

Obviously, the rich have been buying phones faster than the poor. But this happens with every innovation. Mobile phone take-up among the poor has actually been far quicker than it was in the case of previous products, such as colour television, computers and Internet access. Indeed, as mobile phones continue to become cheaper and more powerful, they might prove to be more successful in bridging the gap between the rich and the poor than expensive computers.

There are obviously drawbacks to mobiles as well: mobile users are two and a half times more likely to develop cancer in areas of the brain adjacent to their phone ear, although researchers are unable to prove whether this has anything to do with the phone; mobile thefts now account for a third of all street robberies in London, and don’t forget about all the accidents waiting to happen as people drive with a mobile in one hand. But, overall, mobile phones have proved to be a big benefit for people.