Pew: Cellphones More Important To Users Than Internet, TV, Email

Mar 5, 2008 at 12:40pm ET by Greg Sterling

Anyone who doubts how important mobile phones are and will become as a platform and marketing medium needs only to look at the latest Pew Internet & American Life report. Cellphones are now more important to US adults than the internet, television, landline phones, and email. In addition, an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for things other than voice communications, including accessing mobile internet content.

Pew conducted a telephone survey of 2,054 US adults in December, 2007 (500 were reached on their cellphones) and found the following:

Pew segments the data by race, age, and, in some cases, income. Among younger uses, as one might expect, the trends become even more pronounced:

18-29 year olds: Ever done (%) Typical day (%)

Send or receive text messages 85 60 Take a picture 82 31 Play a game 47 16 Send or receive email 28 10 Access the internet 31 14 Record a video 34 6 Play music 38 16 Send or receive instant messages 26 9 Get a map or directions to another location 18 6 Watch video 19 6

Just a day earlier, comScore reported that the number of users who access the Internet through mobile broadband connections (predominantly using a PC) had grown by 154 percent in a year. Currently, roughly 1 percent of the US online population uses mobile broadband to get online but those numbers should increase dramatically as the mobile infrastructure continues to develop — and more people use 3G mobile networks on their cellphones for internet access.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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