Smartphones Replacing PCs In Some Households
Approximately 33 percent of Americans surveyed own a smartphone and a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found some interesting information about how we use them.
Eighty-seven percent of smartphone users are going online or checking their mail with their smartphones, with 67 percent saying they do so daily. Twenty-five percent of users have a smartphone as their primary means of connecting to the internet and do not own a desktop or laptop computer.
Many Americans are “cutting the computer cord,” according to the Washington Post, and people who are “minorities, younger than 30 and have low incomes” are “using mobile devices as a suitable replacement for buying expensive computers and paying DSL or cable modem bills every month[...]“
Smartphone users are diverse with most being financially well-off and educated. Adoption of smartphone use by blacks and Hispanics is particularly high at 44 percent.
“For businesses, government agencies and nonprofits who want to engage with certain communities, they will find them in front of a four-inch screen, not in front of a big computer in their den,” Aaron Smith, a researcher at Pew and author of the report, told the Washington Post.
Sixty-three percent of all current web traffic is generated by computers, but that number is expected to decline to 46 percent by 2015, according to Cisco, the internet network equipment maker. “Speeds are improving, wifi is getting faster and devices are proliferating,” Cisco vice president of policy Mary L. Brown told the Post’s Cecilia Kang.
By 2015, the number of mobile internet users around the globe will increase 56-fold to 788 million users, Cisco explains.
Despite these growing numbers, smartphones have limitations for now. For example, filling out a medical form or a job application and creating presentations is difficult because of the content formatting on mobile devices.
Carriers for data services are also following their own agendas by discouraging smartphone users from cutting the cord to their cable or DSL provider. Verizon, for instance, charges new customers for every bit of data they consume, rather than offering all-you-can-eat monthly plans.
Public interest groups say those bundled packages are designed to keep users in contracts for multiple services. AT&T and Verizon, for instance, offer wireless, broadband home internet and television services.
“In many cases these wireless carriers also have wireline and television services and what they want is to encourage users to keep using all three services, not to replace one for the other,” Benjamin Lennett, a senior technology policy analyst at the New America Foundation, told the Washington Post.
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