One in four U.S. adults prefer a smartphone for Web browsing

By Mike Flacy July 12, 2011

The Pew Internet Project completed a survey of 2,277 U.S. adults and found that 35 percent of respondents owned a smartphone. Twenty-five percent of smartphone owners preferred using the phone for browsing the Internet over a personal computer. However, one third of smartphone owners do not have access to high-speed broadband at home. Fifty-nine percent of households that earn an income of $75,000 or more had at least one smartphone user and 48 percent of people with an undergraduate college degree owned a smartphone.

Adults between the ages of 25 to 34 years old are most likely to own a smartphone, while 44 percent of adults over 65 years old didn’t own a cell phone at all. Hispanic and African-American adults are more likely to own a smartphone than Caucasians, and men are more likely to be smartphone owners than women. Eighty-seven percent of the respondents use the phone to browse the Web while 68 percent of that group did so daily. Smartphone owners are more likely to own a laptop over a desktop computer, and tablet adoption is more than four times higher with smartphone owners over owners of simple cell phones. E-reader adoption is about twice as much with smartphone owners as well. Adults who didn’t own a cell phone at all are most likely to own a desktop computer.

iPhones and BlackBerry phones are three to four more times likely to be found in affluent, well-educated households. BlackBerry ownership is also more likely to be found with adults who are employed. iPhone ownership is more likely to be found in urban or suburban areas over rural locales. When smartphone owners were asked to describe the phone with a single word, the most common answers were “convenient”, “great” and “good”. While the words were overwhelmingly positive, negative descriptions included “expensive” and “frustrating”.

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