Dial M for entertainment, the mobile revolution

· Phone survey finds users big on music and games
· Age and sex fail to divide company's 15m customers

Richard Wray, communications editor
Tuesday May 15, 2007
The Guardian

The phone company Orange reveals today how its 15 million customers are using their mobiles as entertainment centres for music, videos and games.

The company's first digital media index shows its customers send 872m text messages a month, with most sent between 4pm and 8pm as people plan a night out. Despite being launched five years ago, picture messaging, however, remains something of a niche service with 5.4m sent a month.

Many mobile phones can access the internet - Orange also has more than 2.1 million customers accessing the web each month - as well as downloading games, ringtones and video clips. In the first three months of this year, almost 750,000 games were downloaded on the Orange network, with Sonic the Hedgehog, Worms and Space Invaders (Anniversary Edition) the top three choices.