There are many baffling aspects to life in this country, but there are few things more bewildering than the statistics associated with our love of mobile phones.
As The National’s sister paper Al Ittihad reported this week, mobile phone subscriptions reached record highs in the UAE in April. There are now 17 million active numbers. Only 14 months ago, that figure stood at just over 14m, which represents a rise of 214,000 handsets a month or 7,000 new subscriptions a day – and that’s a lot of new phones.
It is common knowledge that the UAE tops global smartphone penetration league tables. Such devices are so important to many of us that we can't go five minutes without checking our emails or looking for status updates on Facebook. Some people still even use their phones to make calls.
But that doesn’t really explain these statistics. Even if you were to dismiss half of this country’s approximately 8m population as either being too young or too sensible to own more than one phone, that would still leave the other four million of us juggling three handsets each. Many office workers are issued with a work phone to supplement their personal handset, but that still leaves the unanswered question of what’s the third phone for?
