What was life like before smartphones? After I’m rudely interrupted out of my daydream by yet another BBM notification, I slowly begin to think about how I could once easily say “What email? I didn’t get an email.” Ahhh yes, the good ‘ole days…the days before there were color-coded LED call notifiers, no worries about dropping your phone and the screen smashing to pieces, or speaking into a phone for directions to Dim Sum Yum and ending up at Julio’s Fried Chicken.

Smartphone news seems to be in its own “Sweeps Week” right now, so I took to the mean and tough offices and cubicles of ZCorum to find out the preferred smartphone choices. I also wanted to take a peek into everybody’s smartphone habits to see what they were doing whether it be shooting a soon-to-be You Tube video on “How to cut onions with a Ginsu knife” or downloading an app that helps to keep socks matched together after laundering. The results were a bit surprising because of all things, I would at least think that smartphones were used for the one thing that they were created for – to talk!  Here’s what I gathered.

At ZCorum, Android is definitely king. The little green troll, alien, robot, mythical creature, or whatever it is is the faux-tattoo that drapes nearly 75% of ZCorum employees’ arms. I’m a bit biased on Android handsets myself since I always want to yell “45-38-21-Hut-Hut-Hut” when holding one in my hand, but in my defense, I am qualified to state that opinion since I’ve actually owned an Android smartphone. BlackBerry is a distant second but beat out iPhone, so there’s some interesting apples for you. I guess that that snazzy Apple marketing hasn’t been able to cast a spell at ZCorum except on the “iPhone girl” and the lover of strawberry “Pot” tarts! Windows Phone was a no show, so Ballmer and company need to get on the ball (pun intended!).

Let it be known that even though we talk, talk, and talk all day long (Hi, Sales team!), making phones calls is one of the least used features on the smartphones! Email tops the list followed closely by web browsing. If email and web browsing were no more, ZCorum employees would be having severe communications withdrawal because those are features that we simply cannot live without. Does that make us a bunch of finger-tapping, email-sending, Googlers? Probably. I thought that social media usage such as Facebook and Twitter would have dominated the most commonly used features/functions, but I guess as the saying goes, “Nerds will be nerds!” I think I just made that up, but working for a tech company, we all seem to develop our own nerdy type niches.

Pretty soon, most of us will be taking a bite of Ice Cream Sandwich or trying to figure out what the “X” stands for in BBX. Oddly, some of us will be driving down the road and mistakenly activate SIRI in an expletive-filled fit of road rage, but despite all of the chaos that may ensue with smartphones, one thing remains constant: They’ll be around somewhere and definitely at ZCorum!