Teens with internet-enabled phones will have more sex with fewer condoms, research at the University of Southern California has found. And the mobe-inspired jigjig was more likely to be with a stranger they met on the internet.

Having a smartphone opened up "a risky avenue" said the researchers: finding a correlation between mobile internet access and sexual activity - for teenagers at least.

High-schoolers with smartphones are 1.5 times more to be sexually active than teens with less fully-featured mobiles.

The teens with (for example) iPhones, were twice as likely to be approached for sex on the internet and twice as likely to have sex with someone they met on the internet. 17% of smartphone owners were approached for sex online by someone they didn't know.

The results of this highly important scientific survey were presented at the 140th Annual meeting of the American Public Health Association yesterday. The researchers surveyed 1,840 high-school students in the Los Angeles last year to gather the results; one third of the teens accessed the internet on their phone.

Non-heterosexual kids were five times as likely to have sex with someone they met on the internet, and it seems like teens were less likely to have safe sex on internet hookups.

Speaking to the Mail, Eric Rice of the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California suggested that it wasn't the network packet flow itself that was encouraging sexual behaviour in the youngsters, but rather that the phone acted as a tool to enable the behaviour.

Sadly there was no information on the type of smartphones used and what impact that had on sexual activity.

However previous scientific research on the area has suggested that iPhone owners have more sexual partners than those with Blackberries - iPhone owners get more sex - or Androids, and also that Android owners were more likely to put out. It's a complicated picture. ®