Consumers love mobile, not mobile entertainment

Mobile phones are officially as American as mom, baseball and apple pie. A new study issued this week by the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that Americans are now more reliant on their mobile phones than on their landline phones--given that respondents cited traditional phone service as the more essential technology when the research firm mounted a similar study just two years earlier, the flip-flop signifies a huge sea change in the collective consciousness of the consumer population. In fact, Pew Research reports that mobile services now top the web and television as the technology Americans would be most reluctant to give up--again, as recently as two years ago, landline service still held the top spot.

It would be nice to imagine that consumers value their mobile phones more than the Internet and television at least in part because they can surf the web and watch their favorite shows on their handsets, but the Pew Research report dashes that hope. Among the 1,704 cell phone and PDA owners surveyed in December 2007, 58 percent of consumers have sent or received text messages at some point in time (a 41 percent increase over April 2006 totals), while 31 percent do so on a daily basis--on average, 15 percent of users also snap photos with their phones every day. That's the good news. More troubling, just 8 percent of users play games every day, while another 8 percent send or receive email every day; only 7 percent access the mobile web for news, weather, sports or related information each day, and another 7 percent play music. At the very bottom of the list is mobile video: So far, only 10 percent of respondents have ever viewed video content, and just 3 percent screen clips on a daily basis. 

And if you're waiting for advertising to subsidize mobile entertainment and stimulate adoption…well, maybe not. A Nielsen Mobile report also released this week says that only 10 percent of U.S. subscribers surveyed believe advertising on their mobile devices is acceptable, although 23 percent of respondents say they've been exposed to mobile advertising initiatives in the past 30 days--more than half of them even responded to the ad in some way. In all, while 32 percent of subscribers said they are agreeable to mobile advertising as long as it lowers their monthly bill, only 13 percent said they are on board if the ads improve the media and content selection currently available. Americans may love their mobile phones more than ever before, but their indifference to services beyond voice and messaging isn't nearly so quick to change. - Jason