• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 6, 2011

iPhone users spend nearly twice as much time playing games on their handsets as the average mobile gamer, and about 50% more than Android users. New user data from Nielsen shows that iPhone owners, on average, played games 14.7 hours in the last 30 days compared to an industry average of 7.8 hours.

Google's Android platform was second to the Apple device, at 9.3 hours a month. People with Windows Phone 7 devices, feature phones and BlackBerry handsets lagged behind, each playing about games about 4.5 hours a month.

The findings are based on Nielsen's (mostly online) survey of 20,000 to 25,000 mobile consumers each month.

Depending on the game, longer game play could translate into more ad exposure, giving the iPhone a distinct advantage over competitors in that regard. Games overall remained the most popular app category, with nearly two thirds (64%) of those who downloaded apps in the last 30 days using game apps.

Other top app categories include weather, used by 60% of app downloaders, social networking (56%), maps/navigation (51%), and music, (44%). At the bottom of the 19 app segments tracked by Nielsen were health (13%), education/learning (11%) and household/personal care (6%).

On the app payment front, nine out of 10 users are ready to pay up for games. According to mobile app analytics firm Flurry, paid game apps on the iOS and Android operating systems accounted for 8% of industry sales last year, or $800 million. Besides game apps, people were most likely to pay for entertainment apps (87%), productivity and maps/navigation (both 84%), food (77%), and news (76%).

The vast majority of iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and Android download games, while the bulk of feature phone and BlackBerry users play pre-loaded games. That finding underscores the difficulty BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion faces as it tries to get developers to create more apps for its smartphone platform.

Nielsen's download data is based on twice-yearly surveys of 4,000 app downloaders twice a year.