Smartphone users admit addiction

More than a third of adults and around 60 per cent of teenagers who own smartphones class themselves as "highly addicted" to their devices, research from Ofcom suggests.

The media watchdog also found that smartphone users tend to make more calls and send more text messages than their counterparts with normal handsets – 81 per cent with smartphones make at least one call per day, compared with 53 per cent of "regular" phone owners.

In its Communications Market Report, released today, Ofcom detected a huge rise in the number of homes in the UK with internet access over the past 11 years.

In 2000, only a quarter of homes were online, a figure that has risen to 76 per cent today. And more than 90 per cent of people now own a mobile phone of some description, up from 36 per cent in 2000, the research shows.