If you earn more than $75,000 a year in the US, you probably have a smartphone. That’s not too surprising, but a lot of other information in this new Pew study of smartphone adoption is.
More than one-third of Americans now have smartphones. If you live somewhere like San Francisco or Atlanta that may seem slightly low, and that’s because 38 per cent of urban and suburban residents have them, while only 21 per cent of rural residents do. I suspect that has as much to do with 3G and mobile phone tower access as anything else.
Meanwhile, if you are black or Latino, you are more likely to have a smartphone than if you are white. 44 per cent of black and Latino respondents to the Pew study had smartphones, versus 30 per cent of whites.
If you earn less than $30,000 a year, you are just as likely to not have a mobile phone at all as to have a smartphone. That is, unless you are young. A full 39 per cent of 18-29 year olds who earn less than 30 stacks have smartphones.
That’s higher than the national average. It means young people are willing to sacrifice elsewhere to pay for a nice phone. As consumer habits settle in when people are young, you know handset manufacturers will love that.
And then there’s this great word cloud. The survey asked people how they felt about their phones. Most people really love them! Or at least consider them necessary. But see that small subset of people who replied “sucks” and “irritating” and “pain” and “annoying?”
Yeah. I’m guessing those are Symbian users.