One in three people notices a missing mobile phone in minutes

A YOUGOV SURVEY carried out on behalf of insecurity firm Securenvoy has found that around a third of people notice that they've lost a mobile phone within 15 minutes, while the rest take up to an hour.

The firm, which provides tokenless two-factor authentication security for handsets, presumably decided to conduct this survey for purely altruistic reasons and found that men notice missing phones quicker than women and younger people notice the quickest of all.

Why this is remains to be discovered, since after all Securenvoy was not paying for a study into social mores and gender based differences.

"What these figures suggest is that mobile phones have become part of the national psyche, with people carrying them around much in the same way as they carry their wallets and purses," said Steve Watts, co-founder of Securenvoy.

"The clear trend is that the younger a person is - and the more steeped in the digital culture they are - the more use and awareness they have of their mobile handset, resulting in mental alarm bells ringing if they find their prize possession missing, for whatever reason."

Around 25 per cent of young people, for these purposes that is those that fall between 18 and 24, notice an errant phone in five minutes, while just 13 per cent of the over 55s can say the same. This difference is slight, so perhaps the firm is splitting grey hairs.

Also rather obscure is the fact that it takes married people longer to notice that their phone has gone missing than it takes single people. But that might be because single people keep checking their phones for signs of contact with the outside world, while married people set them to Silent. µ