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Mobile phones more important than wallets 5/13 Reuters 1/3 of workers would choose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop or digital music player if they had to leave the house for 24 hours & could take only one item. A survey by IDC & Nortel Networks, found that while 38% of the 2,367 people polled chose their mobile phones, less than 30% chose their wallets first. In the survey, Nortel was looking to find out how many workers around the world can be defined as ‘hyperconnected,’ or as those who have fully embraced multiple devices like cellphones & laptops, & applications like e-mail or social networking sites like Facebook. The answer: 16%, & growing. The survey classified the hyperconnected worker as someone who uses at least 7 devices for work & personal access, in addition to at least 9 applications like instant messaging, text messaging or web conferencing. The country with the highest % of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China. Canada & the UAE had the fewest number among the 17 countries covered in the survey. The survey predicts the number of the hyperconnected will likely rise to 40% in 5 years. That could bode well for Toronto-based Nortel, which has bet heavily on the hope that as bandwidth & network demand soar with more devices connecting to the Internet, so too will demand for the network technologies it makes. The group of hard-core communications users is followed by a larger subset - 36% of respondents - designated as ‘increasingly connected,’ the study states. These workers use a minimum of 4 devices & 6 applications. The hope for a flood of new devices going online have yet to translate into a more robust bottom line for Nortel, which has struggled since the technology bubble burst earlier this decade. The company predicts revenue growth for the year will be in the low single digits. It announced 2,100 new job cuts in February, on top of the thousands it has slashed since 2001. It estimates it could be years before some of the newer technologies it has designed will find big markets. Competition is fierce as low-cost Asian vendors like Huawei Technologies muscle in for market share.