Smartphone users in India are consuming an average 1GB data per day -- from an average 4GB a month not long ago -- and spending more than 90 minutes on online activities daily across the entry-level, mid and premium segments, a Nielsen India report said on Thursday.

India has emerged among the most preferred smartphone markets in the world owing to affordable handset prices and low-cost data penetration, triggering a huge replacement demand among the customers across segments, the "Nielsen Smartphone 2018" report added.

The average smartphone prices have increased from Rs 7,000 in 2015 to Rs 10,000 in 2017 despite the availability of cheap smartphones in India, the report said.

The smartphone users spend more than 90 minutes a day on online activities while the premium segment takes the usage up to 130 minutes per day.

The report highlighted that 50 percent of the total time spent on a smartphone are on chat, video-streaming, browsers, social networking and image apps.

Applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram and Google Chrome get the highest engagement and consume a lot of data, said Nielsen India report.

Abhijit Matkar, Director -Technology IPG - Nielsen India, said, “The advent of high-speed 4G internet, less-expensive mobile handsets and a correction in call data charges have encouraged the speedy adoption of smartphones."

First Published:Sept 27, 2018 7:20 PM IST