Americans spend almost an hour a day on their smartphones, most of it social

New data from Experian, who sampled 12,770 American smartphone owners, reveals that the average person spends 58 minutes a day using their phone, with the majority of that usage social.

On average, smartphone owners devote 26% of the time they spend on their phone talking and another 20% texting. Social networking eats up 16% of smartphone time while browsing the mobile web accounts for 14% of time spent. Emailing and playing games account for roughly 9% and 8% of daily smartphone time, respectively, while use of the phone’s camera and GPS each take up another 2% of our smartphone day …

There are some interesting differenced between Android and iPhone users, with owners of Android handsets spending less time overall using their phone and a higher proportion of that time talking and surfing the web.

In a rather frustratingly small graphic, Experian also breaks out the key activities across all smartphone platforms by popularity, frequency and time spent. The larger the bubble, the more people who engage in that activity, ranging from talking at 79% to reading ebooks at just 0.5%.

Despite oft-heard concerns about smartphones proving socially isolating, with people interacting more with their phone than the people around them, the most popular activities are social ones: talking, texting, email and using social networks. Much web usage is also likely to be social.

The company also released a graphic comparing the time spent across a range of both devices and conventional media.

We noted over on 9to5Mac yesterday that tablet sales look set to overtake PC sales by 2015. However, the comparative time spent using tablets and PCs seems to suggest that the true post-PC era is still some way off, with over 12% of Americans using their home PC for at least 20 hours a week against less than 2% for tablets.