What do you use your phone for? No doubt you spend some of the time making phone calls, after all that is the general purpose of a mobile phone. But if you own one of the latest smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S, the Nokia N8 or the iPhone 4, then it is very likely that using it to make calls is not at the top of your priority list.

According to recent research, the amount of time that we use our phones for making calls is on the decline, and rapidly so. Last year mobile phone uses averaged 20 minutes a day making phone calls and now, just one year later, that has decreased to an average of just 10 minutes a day.

In terms of a phone contract, this means that contracts offering just 300 minutes a month are now the most popular, and of the contracts recently taken out there are three times as many 300 minutes a month contracts when compared to 600 minutes a month. Last year 600 minutes a month contracts were the most popular. When searching for contracts on the web, 51% of searches offer 300 minutes a month maximum. There are even fewer people who take out 900 minutes a month contracts. These account for just 12% of total contracts and mobile phone deals.

People are also happy with longer term contracts than before. In the past short term contracts were popular as people enjoyed the opportunity of an early upgrade to their phone, but now they have found that two year contracts are the most cost effective. 85% of web searches are for two year contracts, 10% for eighteen month contracts and 5% for twelve month contracts.

But does this mean that we are making less use of our phones? In fact far from this, the opposite is the case. We are using our phones more and more and they are becoming an even more important part of our lives than they were before. We spend more time surfing the web, more time involved in our social networks, and far more time sending text messages than we ever did before; we just prefer this to talking on the phone, especially in public places. We can all thank smartphones for these changes.

This has been a guest post by Dial A Phone. For great mobile phone deals head over to dialaphone to check out all the latest offers.