Boffins claim that the iPhone is addictive following a system which is heavy on marketing and light on science.

Research carried out by Stanford University survey showed tested 200 students 70 percent of whom had owned their iPhones for less than a year. Nearly 85 per cent of the iPhone owners used the phone as their watch, and 89 percent used it as their alarm clock. More than 10 percent of the students acknowledged full addiction to the device, 34 percent ranked themselves as a four on the scale, and only six percent said they weren't addicted at all.

Professor Tanya Luhrmann, the Stanford anthropology professor who oversaw the survey, told the San Jose Mercury News, "One of the most striking things we saw in the interviews was just how identified people were with their iPhone. It was not so much with the object itself, but it had so much personal information that it became a kind of extension of the mind and a means to have a social life. It just kind of captured part of their identity."

Apple's wonder phone may even be a confidence booster: 74 percent said the iPhone also made them feel cool. The fact that the survey and its results could have been written by the Apple Marketing department, the poll does raise some alarming questions about the standards of science. For a start Luhrmann and her team only interviewed the users of one brand of phone. The addictive quality she notes in her study were first noted by Blackberry users, which gave it the nickname “crackberry”. The “addiction” she mentions could apply to any brand of phone and not just the iPhone.

Luhrmann only interviewed some of the most deluded customers in the world who tend to regard their purchase as a religion. Thus it is like asking a born-again Christian if they are addicted to Christ and ignoring the fact that other religions might have committed followers. Not surprisingly this so called study has been seized on by the tame Apple press as a reason why you should buy an iPhone.