25% of smartphone owners go online mostly on phone

Of those who mainly go online from their phones, 30% have no broadband access at home

When I got my very first iPhone, I was like a 13-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert: moony-eyed, swooning, and totally ready to go to third base on the first date. I am part of the growing trend of smartphone adopters, a community that is rapidly thriving and using their devices in pretty interesting ways.  The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project released a study Monday that found that not only does a full one-third (35%) of American adults now own smartphones, but that 25% of smartphone owners now use their phones to access the Internet more often than their PCs.

In a survey of 2,277 people in April and May 2011, smartphone ownership was found to be most prevalent among the financially well off, college educated, and non-white groups.  Some 59% of respondents living in households with annual incomes of $75K or more reported owning a smartphone, as did 48% of those with college educations, and 44% of black and Latino respondents.

Interestingly, a full quarter of all smartphone owners in the study said they access the Internet more from their smartphones than any other device, such as a PC.  By comparison, 68% of respondents said they use their smartphones to go online on a typical day.  And who is using their smartphone as their primary means for accessing the Internet?  Those under the age of 30, non-white smartphone owners, and those with relatively low income and education levels.

That actually makes a lot of sense.  Those people are probably considered low income because they’re spending all of their money on crazy data charges.

And now for the kicker: roughly one-third of all those who rely primarily on their smartphone for Internet access actually have NO broadband access at home.  Those data charges: yowza...

But the study’s findings definitely have some interesting implications for the mobile industry, including mobile ads and mobile payments.  If a full quarter of smartphone owners access the Internet primarily from their phone, then it stands to reason that those same users are more likely to engage with mobile ads.  And assuming this trend continues to grow, we could be seeing a veritable explosion in mobile ads and other mobile services.  The question is, IS this a growing trend, or just a sub-group of super-users?

“This is our first time measuring smartphone adoption as a standalone question so we will have to wait and see whether that group is growing or not—we don’t have any past data to compare it to at the moment,” said the report’s author Aaron Smith. “But looking at that group, it’s generally a mix of people who have other options (at least at home) but choose to use their phones for convenience or other reasons, and people who lack other home options and rely fairly heavily on their phone as their main source of access.”

Image source: psfk.com