Thursday, July 23, 2009

Surfing by phone: Significant growth

Seems it's only a matter of time before Americans are accessing the Net via phones as much as on computers. And certainly, Web access is coming to the cellphone of a kid near you! A just-released survey by the Pew/Internet Project found that 56% of US adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly - via laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player, and about a third (32%) have used a cellphone to access the Net "for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking." That figure for phone-based access is up one-third since December 2007, "when 24% of Americans had ever used the Internet on a mobile device." On a typical day, Pew adds 19% of Americans use the Net from their phones - 73% growth over 16 months.

2 comments:

  1. I wonder how much of that phone-based growth is attributable to the rise of Twitter?

    I'd also be curious to see if there is a corresponding drop in non-mobile internet access, or if people are just generally more active online.

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  2. Good questions, Kai! I'm no researcher, but I suspect that the answer to both is "not much." I think people's Net-access, communications, and social tools are simply diversifying; they aren't simply abandoning one for the other. But there's no question that Web using is getting increasingly mobile and that phone are eating into non-mobile Net usage a bit.

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