More than half of Americans aged 25-29 now live in households with mobile phones but no traditional landline telephones, a December 2010 report on phone use by the US National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has found. The same study also found that the younger children are, the likelier they are to live in homes that only have wireless phones, suggesting that younger parents are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile phones even as they adjust from being single to a more settled family lifestyle. According to a recent video report by Mobile Future, a Washington, D.C., broad-based coalition of businesses and non-profit organisations, ...view middle of the document...
The smartphone user tends to be younger than the general cell phone audience. The U.S. Smartphone ownership is skewed towards persons ages 25 – 44, while the mobile audience overall remains comparatively flat across age groups (Age, 2010). Regarding Smartphone functions, young people indicate a higher satisfaction level with texting than older people (Balakrishnan and Yeow, 2007). A study conducted by Scarborough Research found that adults in the U. S. who use the text-messaging feature on their cell phone are 49% more likely than the average American to be between age 18-24, 14% more likely to be Hispanic and 24% more likely to be African American (Texting, 2008). Mobile email users tend to be 18-44 years old, self-employed or employed full time, affluent, and highly educated. Seventy-two percent of mobile email users have an annual household income of $100,000 or more, though the decreasing cost of Smartphone and the launch of new devices like the iPhone have begun to attract less-affluent groups (Smartphone, 2011). While marketers have been diligent in studying the demographic characteristics of Smartphone users, they have ignored the impact of personality on Smartphone ownership and use. The purpose of this study is to examine which personality types are most likely to have a Smartphone and which functions are most important to them. The Special Issue on Contemporary Issues in Business Studies © Centre for Promoting Ideas, USA 23 Personality is a stable set of characteristics and tendencies that determine peoples’ commonalities and differences in thoughts, feelings, and actions (Maddi 1989). Many individual traits have been...
