While some will see this as anything but a surprising newsflash, Pew Research is out with a new report indicating that Americans are tethered to their mobile devices to an unprecedented extent.
And Pew is backing up the report with some formidable numbers.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project now finds that 85 percent of American adults own a cellphone and “use their devices to do much more than make phone calls.”
In 2012, for example, Pew says that 56 percent of all cellphone owners used their mobile devices to access the Internet. That’s a huge 31 percent increase since 2008 when only 25 percent of all cell phone owners said the same thing,
Another activity on the rise among the mobile users is the downloading of apps—about 43 percent of all cellphone owners said they had downloaded an app to their phone this April. The number of individuals downloading apps, the report shows, increased by 21 percent since 2009. App downloading is most popular among young people, with 65 percent of 18-29 year-olds participating in this activity, followed next by 30-49 year-olds at 53 percent.
To learn more about this particular report’s findings and other research being undertaken by Pew, check out Pew’s Internet and American Life Project here.