Nielsen: The average US smartphone owner uses 435MB of data a month

Although for Android users, that's 582MB...

New research published by Nielsen claims that the amount of data consumed by the average US smartphone user every month has risen by 89% in the last year, from 230MB a month to 435MB a month.

That includes some true data hogs: Nielsen says the top one per cent of users now consume more than 4.6GB of data a month, up from 1.8GB a year ago.

The company also breaks out the figures for Android and iPhone owners specifically - 582MB a month for Android and 492MB for iPhone. Why is Android higher? It may be due to more Android owners making use of Google's wireless hotspot feature, with iPhone only getting a similar feature relatively recently.

Nielsen says that the average Windows Phone 7 user in the US consumes 317MB of data a month, while BlackBerry users account for 127MB.

The company also says the amount the average US smartphone user pays for 1MB of data has dropped from 14 cents to eight cents in the last year.