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GLOBAL – Accessing media on mobile phones has increased significantly, with more and more people using their phones in other ways than just making a phone call, according to The 2010 Mobile Year in Review report presented by comScore. Here are some of the details to that report.

It’s now just over 135 years (on March 10th) since Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call and it’s all thanks to him that we now have the ability to take our mobile phones from our pockets and phone our nearest and dearest. I doubt he ever foresaw that the humble telephone would one day be the gateway to a whole world of information, though.

People now use their phones to log on to the Internet, check emails or access media content such as videos or music. While this isn’t new as it’s been happening over the past few years, what is new is the rapid growth of such usage.

The report comes from comScore, “a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence,” and compares the usage in December 2009 to December 2010, showing that – in the US at least – the number of mobile media users has grown from 100,716,000 users to 109 million in the space of a year, that’s a 7.6 per cent increase. That percentage may not sound much, but it means that the number will double in ten years if the trend continues.

Social networking was the biggest draw for people with a 56 per cent increase over the same time last year with almost 58 million mobile subscribers checking their friends status updates, shortly followed by classifieds growing by 55 per cent with 17 million users and online retail seeing a 53 per cent rise from the previous year.

The report doesn’t just show how people are logging online but also media in general, whether it be taking photos, listening to music or playing games on your mobile device. Europeans are big on using their phones for mobile gaming with 25.3 per cent twitching their thumbs on their devices keypad and 25 per cent regularly use their phone for listening to music.

There could be several reasons for the increase. Stronger competition in the mobile technology world means that manufacturers and developers are improving services or features significantly to attract new customers, or maybe we’ve just learned how to make the most out of the devices we’ve got in our pockets and make them serve us better. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that mobile phones have evolved from a simple device that makes a phone call to something much more important and useful. It wasn’t that long ago when we wanted one device to make phone calls and another for navigation for example, so have we finally accepted that convergence of many devices into one is a good thing? What do you think, do you make the most of your phone?

We’ve only just scratched the surface and bought you a selection of what the report has to offer, so we recommend you take the time to navigate to comScore and look through the document for any more details.

images taken from The 2010 Mobile Year in Review report.