Pew Internet Report on Mobile Technology Use

I haven't seen this posted anywhere in the mobilist-blogosphere, even though it is a couple of weeks old. The Pew Internet & American Life Project posted a report on Mobile Access to Data and Information. It's fascinating reading for anybody interested in US mobile data use, and it's collected by user surveys not server logs.

I trust this data more than the recently posted M:Metrics data that asserted that camera phone penetration in 2005 was about the same size as the percent of Sprint phones in the population. Since nearly all of the Sprint devices were camera phones, this seems unlikely to me.

Of especial interest is the degree to which mobile data penetration is far higher amongst the Black and (English-speaking) Hispanic populations than it is amongst the white population. Use is distributed by age about how you would expect it to be.

One of my favorite ways to measure the relevance of a given technology is how hard it would be to give it up. And there we find, right on page 6, that the mobile phone is harder to give up than television, email, Internet, or a landline. This measure changes a bit when you slice the data by age group, as you might expect.