study Archive

  • Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls

    Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls

    Posted on May 14, 2010 | No Comments
    Ever notice how easy it is to find mobile plans with unlimited minutes these days? Yeah, it's because they're about as valuable as pea coats in the dead of summer. With more and more consumers disconnecting their landlines in favor of using their cellie for everything, the art of communicating via voice is also becoming lost. According to "government and industry data" cited in a New York Times report, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has "stagnated," with 2009 being the first year ever in which the "amount of data in text, email messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices [in the US] surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls." Dan Hesse, Sprint's head honcho, even chimed in with this nugget: "Originally, talking was the only cellphone application; now it's less than half of the traffic on mobile networks." We also learned that the average length of a mobile call was just 1.81 minutes in 2009, a drop from the 2.27 minutes per call seen in 2008, with many individuals feeling that other communication methods (email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) were far less invasive of someone's time, being that they could respond to those messages at their convenience. Of course, on the Upper East Side (where all the richies use Verizon dumbphones, apparently), we get the impression that yakking away about a cornucopia of drama is still the hotness.

    Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 May 2010 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Pew Internet report reveals what everyone already knows: Teens like to text

    Pew Internet report reveals what everyone already knows: Teens like to text

    Posted on April 20, 2010 | No Comments
    If you've seen a teenager in the last two years, then you've seen a teenager texting. Seriously, I can't think of a situation in the last couple of years where I saw a teenager without a cell phone. The teenagers in my extended family send text messages seemingly all day long, every day. Now the Pew Internet and American Life project has released a pretty comprehensive analysis of teen texting behavior.

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  • Breaking: Online social network use isn’t detrimental to your actual social network

    Breaking: Online social network use isn’t detrimental to your actual social network

    Posted on November 5, 2009 | No Comments
    A Pew Internet & American Life study has refuted the idea that use of the Internet necessarily leads to decreased social isolation. Quite the opposite!, yelled a character in a Charles Dickens novel. It turns out that as people continually use things like Twitter, Facebook, and the like, they're both expanding their social circle and increasing contact with said circle.

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  • Silly study looks at iPhone users’ dating habits. Yeah.

    Silly study looks at iPhone users’ dating habits. Yeah.

    Posted on November 5, 2009 | No Comments
    There's a silly study, conducted by Retrevo, making the rounds that purports to analyze how iPhone users fare in the dating world. I know, right? One stat to whet your beak: one in three iPhone owners have admitted to breaking up with their significant other via text message. Amazing.

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  • Cellphones thinner than ever

    Cellphones thinner than ever

    Posted on October 10, 2009 | No Comments

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    Strategy Analytics latest look at its spec-tracking (hence the name) SpecTRAX database of wireless devices has unearthed a few juicy tidbits of information, none more notable than the fact that phone thickness is at a new all-time low -- 13.96mm on average, the first time the metric has ever fallen below 14mm (for comparison, Motorola's original DynaTAC clocked in around 89mm, so we're making some solid improvement there). USB penetration is at a new high, too, supported by some 85 percent of newly-entered devices in the database, and battery life is up 25 percent from two years ago. Of course, that's still not nearly long enough -- battery tech is falling dangerously behind virtually every other technology that goes into the making of a mobile device, sadly -- but we'll take any improvement we can get.

    [Via MobileTechNews]

    Cellphones thinner than ever originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • World ranking: New Yorkers pay lowest cell phone charges

    World ranking: New Yorkers pay lowest cell phone charges

    Posted on August 12, 2009 | No Comments
    I'm aware studies comparing cell phone charges generally have to be taken with a grain of salt (especially cross-country studies like the following one), but this one coming from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is pretty interesting. It's not really a "world" ranking, but the ministry compared [JP, PDF] cell phone charges in seven major cities in Europe, Asia and the US. The result in a nutshell: New Yorkers are pretty lucky, Parisians aren't.

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