Rubicon Consulting came out with an interesting study earlier this month about the iPhone and how people are using it. There were a number of key findings you can read about there or on PSFK. But the one I want to focus on–because I see it happening more and more–is that people are carrying two phones.


In fact, according to Rubicon, around one-third of iPhone users keep a second phone around "either for basic voice calling, or for other functions like composing e-mail."
This confirms something I've long noticed anecdotally: people with PDAs, be they iPhones or Blackberries, often keep a second phone on hand to make calls. One reason for is the desire to keep their work lives separate from their personal lives.
For many, the two-phone strategy stems from a desire to leave work behind. I admit to falling into this category myself: the Blackberry gets my work email. When I leave it on the dresser on weekends and just take my Razr with me, it gives me the opportunity to forget about work for a while.
Other people I know see it more in terms of a privacy or respect issue: they feel guilty making personal calls on a device their employers provides to them for work-related calls and emails only. Or, they worry about the fact that the phone isn't theirs and somehow their calls (to headhunters?) could be tracked.
Finally, there's the fact that conventional cell phones still feel more like, well, phones, where iPhones and Blackberries feel more like walkie-talkies. So using them for conversation still doesn't feel all that natural, especially since most people don't/won't use a Bluetooth headset.
It's an interesting stat to bear in mind as we move forward with mobile technology. Because in addition to the work/personal split, I suspect that people will start to intuitively separate technology on the basis of how they receive it, rather than by size or location of the actual device. Because we read very differently than we watch or listen. And we either read, listen and watch things for very different reasons.
To wit: At Blogger Social 08, I was discussing the video microblogging service Seesmic with three 22 year-old bloggers (Seni Thomas, Ryan Karpeles and Nathan Snell) and they all had the same reaction I did: it was way too much work to watch each Seesmic mini-video to see if there was any value to it, whereas reading through tweets on Twitter did not present the same problem.
Why? Because reading and watching are two fundamentally different actions. Much like reading email and reading websites are fundamentally different than talking on the telephone. We do them in different locations using different social rules with different levels of involvement and engagement.
That's a huge distinction that everyone from marketers to engineers to user experience gurus seems to overlook, and it may just wind up being the main way we categorize our use of media. And for that reason alone, it definitely bears keeping an eye on.