Nearly 1 in 5 people drop their smartphone in the toilet

By Mike Flacy July 21, 2011

Based off a new study from Plaxo, 19 percent of people drop their smartphone in the toilet and are forced to spend money on a costly replacement. Plaxo is in the business of protecting data as its service provides contact syncing across a variety of devices. This data corresponds with another study from Google that stated nearly four out of every ten people bring the phone into the bathroom for use. Of the 19 percent, more than half state that the biggest hassle in replacing a mobile phone is restoring the contact database.

The study also stated that 66 percent of people use the same address book to store both workplace and personal contacts. When asked about the value of their contact lists, the minimum response was $500 while the maximum was “priceless”. Specific to people in the Generation Y category, thirty two percent of this demographic is likely to backup all contacts in the address book to cloud-based storage. Sixty five percent of Gen. Y are very comfortable with using online backups and twenty two percent are likely to own a tablet. Generation Y is also the most likely to pay for cloud service in regards to data backup and 24 percent consider it worth over $1,000.

With 25 percent of Americans preferring to browse the Internet with a smartphone instead of a PC, it’s no surprise that people are using smartphones more often and putting them at greater risk of accidents. Forty percent of the respondents expect to rely more on the cloud over the next two years. People that routinely backed up data from computers were far more likely to backup their phone data as well. Specific to smartphone owners, 72 percent routinely back up their data from the phone and 68 percent backed up data on home computers. For anyone that does drop a mobile phone into the toilet, placing the phone in dry rice is a popular home remedy. The rice soaks up the moisture inside the phone.

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