Orange UK's 15 million customers downloaded an average of 250,000 mobile games a month in the first quarter of 2007 (700,000 for the whole period), compared to 250,000 ringtones, full-track music downloads and music videos combined per month and 65,000 wallpapers.

The fact that games is the leading individual content category by some margin will come as a surprise to many and will no doubt provide ammunition to publishers, many of who believe operators should spend more time promoting games than 'emerging' services like mobile TV and music downloads.

The figures from Orange's newly-launched Media Usage Index (as revealed in The Guardian) also reveal the average mobile gamer is 30 years old, with the average Orange customer downloading 0.05 games during the quarter.

The top selling games for the quarter were Glu's Sonic the Hedgehog, THQW's Worms and Taito's Space Invaders (Anniversary Edition) the top three choices.

Elsewhere, the Orange World portal attracts two million unique visitors and 70 million page impressions a month. The operator did not release figures regarding mobile TV usage.

Ovum analyst Eden Zoller welcomed the decision by Orange to publish the data. She said: "Mobile operators, and in fact service providers in general, are typically very reluctant to provide information about customer usage patterns. The little that is made public is bare bones key performance indicators)buried in financial results. This might have been OK as a metric of performance and market trends couple of years ago, but is no longer adequate in a mobile market where the dynamics are shifting from voice to data and richer content services."