Hasta La Gadget!

There have been signs that Americans are leaning more and more on the smartphone as a primary internet device, and nowhere is that clearer than the latest edition of Pew’s Cell Internet Use survey. The research group found that 21 percent of American cellphone owners now get online chiefly through their handset, up from 17 percent last year. Offline users, meanwhile, have been reduced to a minority — 63 percent of US cell owners have hopped on the internet from their phones at some point. The PC isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s clear that the traditional computer is just one internet client among many.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Comments

Source: Pew Internet

Need yet another constant stream of election information? AT&T’s joined up with the Pew Center to bring election coverage to your pocket, courtesy of VoteHub. The new app is a “nonpartisan clearinghouse for essential voter information,” including candidate info, AP press coverage, election results and the requisite social sharing through sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The app’s available now for Android, with an iOS version coming in the near future.

Continue reading AT&T launches VoteHub, brings the presidential election to your pocket

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

AT&T launches VoteHub, brings the presidential election to your pocket originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

A new study from Pew Research claims that the more devices we use, the more news we consume. In fact, rather than splitting the time spent consuming news between, say, a smartphone and a tablet, most users who own both devices tend to double the amount of time spent reading the news.

According to the report, which was based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012, tablet owners in particular tend to read more in-depth news pieces, using their slate most in the hours before and after work.

The number of tablet owners has doubled from a study conducted in May of last year, with Pew reporting 22 percent of U.S. adults own tablets. Slap on another 3 percent of U.S. adults who regularly use a tablet owned by someone else in the home, and a quarter of adults without a tablet who plan on picking one up in the next six months.

And of course, smartphone ownership has gone from 35 percent in May 2011 to 44 percent.

More than 60 percent of those tablet owners and smartphone owners access the news from their device each week, and more than 35 percent of tablet and smartphone owners do the same every day. News consumption is the second-most popular activity on both the tablet and smartphone, bested only by email.

What’s perhaps more interesting is the fact that we consume more news for each device we own. Tablet owners spend an average of 51 minutes reading the news, whereas smartphone owners spend around 54 minutes. But people who own both a smartphone and tablet spend an average of 64 minutes on the tablet and 54 minutes on the smartphone checking in on news.

Tablet users in particular tend to read longer, more in-depth articles and 69 percent read a full article when browsing through headlines. Of those who read longer articles on tablets, 78 percent read more than one in-depth piece in a sitting and 72 percent read in-depth articles they weren’t seeking out to begin with.

Almost half (43 percent) of tablet owners say they are consuming more news after getting a tablet, and 31 percent say they look at new sources for news and spend more time reading the news.

Because of this hunger for news, we are more concerned with getting our news from trusted publications. Sixty percent of readers who consume longer articles only read them from a select group of trusted news sources, whereas only 39 percent will read long-form articles from various sources.

It should hardly come as a surprise that folks are spending more and more of their time online on their cellphones, but a new Pew study released today has shed a bit more light on just how common that’s becoming. According to the research group, 17 percent of all cellphone users (including those without smartphones) go online “mostly” on their cellphone, while 33 percent primarily use another device, and five percent use both equally — a hefty 45 percent still don’t use their phones to go online at all, though. Not surprisingly, those numbers go up when broken down by those who do at least use the internet occasionally on their phone — 31 percent of whom go online primarily on their phone — and there’s an even bigger jump when looking at younger users. Among those 18 to 29 who use the internet on their phones, fully 45 percent use their cellphone for most of their online activities. You can find the full report at the source link below.

Pew survey finds that 17 percent of US cellphone users go online mostly on their phones originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 06:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TechCrunch  |  Pew Research Center  | Email this | Comments