Even as the Finnish Nokia tops as the most preferred brand for mobile handsets, the indigenous Bharti Airtel takes the lead as the country’s most favorite service provider, revealed a survey from CyberMedia’s consumer electronic magazine, Living Digital.

Out of the 1000 mobile users questioned across 150 cities, about 50 percent owned a Nokia handset, followed by Sony Ericsson at the second spot with a mere 16 percent owning it.  Following next were Motorola, HTC and a club of brands like Samsung, LG, and other brands like Apple, Blackberry, Asus, Spice, Fly and many more with 7 percent, 5 percent and the remaining percentage of the share, respectively.

While one-third of the respondents were completely satisfied with their current mobile phones, there was one-fifth who was not fully satisfied with their current handsets.

Nearly about half of the respondents said that they will buy a Nokia phone in the future as it provided good value for money. Only 8 percent of the respondents who already owned a Nokia mobile said that they were likely to switch to another brand.

When buying a new handset, 85 percent of the answerers said they looked for features and functionality, while only 42 percent expressed looks and styles as highly essential.

As far as service providers are concerned, about 40 percent of the respondents had Airtel as a service provider followed second by Vodafone with 27 percent subscribers. Others like Idea, Reliance, Aircel and Tata Indicom altogether formed up to 15 percent of the respondents. The state-owned MTNL and BSNL’s subscribers were only 13 percent of the total.

Nearly three fourths of the respondents were satisfied with their mobile service providers, while 19 percent were just about satisfied. A notable point could be the fact that 8 percent of the subscribers, who were dissatisfied, were not satisfied at all.

A staggering 92 percent of the respondents voted for SMS as the most popular mobile application. Over half of them used their mobile phones for listening to music, taking photos, surfing the Internet from their mobiles, and playing games. A little less than 50 percent of the respondents used their mobile phones for work related tasks like using the mobile phone to access the Internet from a laptop, checking emails, managing meetings, appointments and other work.