Looking to get those flights booked? Need to get the bills paid? Want to catch up on what’s going on across the world? Got an hour to kill and in the mood for another episode of your favourite series? All these needs and desires can be fulfilled in a flash thanks to a stupendously brilliant piece of equipment widely known as a smartphone.

It’s been a decade since the late Steve Jobs first presented the concept for the iPhone, and since then, smartphones have become an everyday sight almost anywhere you go in the world. The capabilities of smartphones have evolved over that time, too, growing the mobile phone from a simple device on which to communicate by calls and texts into an all-inclusive communications tool. Indeed, many of us might struggle to remember the last time we checked our emails or logged in to our social media accounts on an actual computer.

If there is a downside to owning a smartphone, it’s that we can very easily let the device run our lives. How many times have you seen conversations interrupted because someone felt compelled to react instantly to a notification on their phone? Worse still is the sight of a group of people sitting together without a single word being exchanged verbally because everyone is enslaved by their phones.

We might believe that we should be contactable 24/7, but there are times when we just need to put our smartphones to one side and devote our full attention to the task or situation at hand, particularly when we’re driving, as failure to focus fully on the road could prove fatal. Nobody is going to disown us just because we didn’t reply to their Snapchat message for a whole 40 minutes.

This infographic from Neon SMS (http://www.neonsms.ie/web-bulk-text.php) explores the extent to which we have become dependent on our smartphones, with some eye-opening statistics that ought to make us rethink how we use our phones.