It’s official. A study released by Google yesterday shows that mobile devices, and smart phones in particular, are now the dominant means of Internet connectivity in five key global markets.
Google conducted the study of smart phone versus feature phone ownership rates throughout last year, pulling data from the USA, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. It found that, while smart phones were were quickly pushing out older feature phones — as you can see above — together, a full 10-percent more people own these connected mobile devices than PC’s or laptops (78-percent vs 68-percent). Tablets were counted separately and are owned by an average of 13-percent of people in these markets.
How about you? Have you made the switch to the mobile-only lifestyle? [AdAge via Textually]
TSH
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:57 AMPersonally I’m a hardware nerd and PC gamer, so I’ll always have some kind of PC – most likely at least one desktop. However I can understand that many people’s internet and data needs would be entirely satisfied with a smartphone. A large number of things had to come together to make this possible, too many to list, but for the most part they have. Probably most important have been the advances in mobile browsers and OSes, growth of signal coverage and data allocations for mobile plans and progress in cloud services for contacts, calendar, file storage etc.
MotorMouth
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 3:52 PMThere seems to either be some missing data or some pretty big assumptions here. I own a smartphone and I do use it to access the internet on occasion but probably 90% or more of my web time is done through my PC. Tethering would also skew the numbers quite a bit, I’d imagine.
Overall though, internet usage is actually a minor reason for having either my phone or PC. I could get by without the web quite easily and probably my phone, too. But there is no way I could last 48 hours without my laptop, my whole life is in there (or attached to it via USB).