A stunning 95% of mobile workers now own smartphones, up from 85% last year, according to a new study coming from mobility purveyor iPass. Nine of out 10 mobile employees are using their smartphones for work purposes, which is a 26% increase from last year.

More significantly, the percentage of mobile employees using Apple's iPhone climbed to 45%--well ahead of the 32% of mobile professionals using Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones. Apple's share bounced up significantly from 31.1% last year, while RIM's declined only slightly from 35% last year.

Android, meanwhile, doubled its share of the mobile professional market to 21% -- putting it ahead of Nokia's Symbian platform.

iPass attributes the rise in smartphone usage and the iPhone's big leap over BlackBerrys to the growing prevalence of "bring your own device" policies being adopted by enterprises. iPass notes that personal smartphones account for 42% of the smartphones in the workplace, up from 34% last year. That means more than four out of 10 mobile workers are providing their own smartphones for business use. Work-provisioned smartphones dropped from 66% to 58% of the total number of smartphones used in the enterprise.

[Learn how to lock down the flood of BYOD smartphones in the enterprise. See the Pocket Guide To Securing Mobile Devices.]

"Today's mobile employees are critical to the success of every enterprise, contributing 240 more work hours a year than their non-mobile counterparts. Connectivity is essential because work is no longer where you go but what you do," said Evan Kaplan, president and CEO of iPass, in the report. "While increasing iPhone usage in the workplace was inevitable, this is the tipping point when the iPhone has overcome the Blackberry on its traditional enterprise turf, and business smartphones are in the hands of nearly every knowledge worker."

But all this connectivity comes at a cost.

The Mobile Workforce Report found that mobile workers have become addicted to their devices, losing sleep, and skipping exercise and other events in order to stay on top of things. Six out of 10 workers admit that they would feel "disoriented, distraught, or lonely" if their smartphone were taken away from them for a week.

A startling 33% of mobile employees claim to be sleeping less due to work, and 25% say they sleep fewer than six hours per night. Also, 60% of mobile employees report not exercising at all due to their connectivity to work.

IT hopefully sees the same thing that iPass did--mobile employees see themselves as highly proficient when it comes to technology. This means 81% of them are calling the helpdesk only as a last resort when facing the most dire straits. (Is this true, IT workers? Can you corroborate?)

The number of tablets being used by mobile employees has jumped, too, climbing from 33% in the second quarter of 2011 to 44% in the third quarter. That's amazing penetration for tablets, which have really only come to the fore in the last 19 months.

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