A new report has emerged from ClickSoftware (News - Alert), suggesting that signing that contract for a new smartphone may be a much, much better deal than anyone expected. Based on the ClickSoftware study, that smartphone may actually be worth as much as $12,000...in terms of time saved.

The ClickSoftware report further detailed that the average smartphone owner paid about $174 for the device, but for the average smartphone user using apps on the device, each saved roughly 88 minutes a day. Taking that 88 minutes per day on average, and running it over the course of an entire year comes to about 22 days and change saved per year.

The ClickSoftware survey was run by Harris Interactive (News - Alert), and focused on the smartphone use habits of 2,120 U.S. Adults—971 of which were smartphone owners—to derive the numbers in question, and in turn discovered that fully 97 percent of respondents were saving at least some time every day by using one of 16 different types of apps. Moreover, the survey found some more specific points that were worth noting.

The main use of smartphones focused around uses related to communication, especially e-mail, text messaging and social networking. Immediately following these three were games and Web browsing, and the top of the list rounded out with weather apps, GPS apps and calendar systems. Men are more likely to use GPS apps than women by nearly two to one, with 17 percent of men identifying GPS apps as one of the top three apps used most often as opposed to 10 percent of women saying likewise. GPS users, further, largely claim—in 72 percent of cases—that GPS saves as much as 30 minutes a day over using a paper map.

What's more, since it's time being saved here, the combination of pay raises and inflation actually work together to make a smartphone a steadily more valuable device. A user that saves one hour at $10 an hour one month, then gets a raise to $12.50 another month but still saves an hour saves more money than previously saved. The gains in productivity, and in savings, don't end there, either: A wide majority of smartphone users, 82 percent, don't think they are using all the features they could be on the devices. On top of that, 77 percent of them believe it's a good idea to be able to access data from all their devices at once.

Of course, the methodology does allow for a lot of wiggle room. The amount of money saved depends on the amount of time saved and the cash value of the time in question, and not everyone will save the same amount. But what's really clear here is that the smartphone is a time saving device, and most everyone could use a little more time on their hands. With such an idea clear in people's minds, finding more ways to save time becomes possible and as the technology advances, steadily more time will be saved, making people more productive overall and giving people more time to relax and pursue personal projects.

The mobile workforce and mobile productivity tools fueled by mobile devices, is giving people back a lot of time, and time is still worth money. The farther along this goes, the more time overall is likely to be saved and that could improve the quality of life for a lot of people.