Mobile Content

Today I’d like to share with you some rather surprising mobile industry data conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between August 3 to September 5, 2007, among a sample of 2,400 adults, 18 and older. I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with it, but nonetheless this is some juicy data for sure.
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We’re not missing anything, are we? When you go to a cell phone store, what are your expectations? Certainly not the best price, and certainly not unbiased advice. If you could find that at the local store, there’d be no need for online stores like Wirefly.com.

So we found it amusing that this notion – that carriers and salespeople have other motivations — appears to be scandalous over in Great Britain.

As the British television investigator reports, these are “some of the mobile phone industry’s most closely guarded secrets,” secrets that “the mobile phone industry doesn’t want you to know.” We learn how “their stores sell us deals that many of us don’t want or need, and in the process make sure that they and their employers earn secret commission.”

I should invite this guy to spend a weekend at a mall in the U.S. He’d get enough material to last the rest of the year.

Your state just passed a cell phone driving law. You know this because it’s on your local news. But what if you go on a road trip?

Do you know the cell phone driving laws of every state you pass through? Will you be pulled over for calling your kids to make sure they’re okay? The Governors’ Highway Safety Association has compiled information on cell phone driving laws for every state. Here are a few key points:

* 5 states (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Washington), the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have enacted jurisdiction-wide cell phone laws prohibiting driving while talking on handheld cell phones.

* 17 states and the District of Columbia have special cell phone driving laws for novice drivers.

* No state completely bans all types of cell phone use (handheld and hands-free) while driving.

Since all states allow hands-free cell phone use, play it safe and use speaker phone or a Bluetooth Headset.

Today the tabloids are abuzz with the news that Carrie Underwood broke off her relationship with actor Chace Crawford via text message.

Not so unusual, says a new Wirefly survey.

Today Wirefly released the results of a survey on consumer text messaging, in which 1 in every 25 cell phone users say they have broken off a romance via text message.

And that wasn’t the only surprising result of our survey. This project was designed to take a closer look at consumers’ text messaging habits; we asked people a series of related questions over a month-long span, and actually managed to shatter some common misconceptions. For starters, we assumed people used text messaging for brief, choppy communication full of abbreviations and emoticons. Not so, says the survey data.

We actually found that 35% of respondents typically send lengthy texts of “several sentences.” That beat out the other options, “one word” (4%), “several words” (33%), and “one sentence” (28%), and seems to indicate that text messagers may be more literate than previously thought…

For more on these results, plus additional data that digs further into the motivations for text messaging, click through for the full Wirefly press release.

Shop free cell phones at Wirefly.com

The CTIA Wireless 2008 exhibition is underway in Las Vegas, and Wirefly has people on the ground in Sin City, meeting with cell phone manufacturers, and sending back some great pictures of new devices.

We’ll feature more specific device-oriented posts soon; for now, though, it seemed appropriate to open our convention coverage by taking a wider view of the industry as a whole. The folks at CTIA have released their year-end survey data from 2007, and there’s plenty to digest:

**The overall number of wireless customers in the U.S. jumped by 9.6% in 2007, and now stands at 255.5 million.

**Average monthly bills, meanwhile, actually fell by almost a dollar, moving from $50.56 to $49.79.

**And here’s a pretty incredible number - the raw number of SMS text messages sent during December of 2007 was 48.1 billion. That’s up a ridiculous 157% over the same month a year prior, in 2006. Just look at this progression: 18.7 billion in Dec. 2006, 28.8 billion in June 2007, 48.1 billion in Dec. 2007. Now that’s a trend.

For more info directly from CTIA, visit the organization’s website. In the meantime, we’ll keep our bloggers chasing after the best pictures from the convention. Stay tuned!

For a while, whenever you saw someone using a cell phone it was most likely a Motorola RAZR. To me, it was a like a sci-fi show where every person in that world had agreed on a single silver jumpsuit to wear and nobody was to wear anything else. But in the real world, consumers would quickly become uninterested with this concept… much like what has happened with the RAZR.

While other manufacturers like Samsung (with the Gleam for Verizon, the M520 for Sprint, the Beat for T-Mobile, and the BlackJack II for AT&T) are keeping the innovation going, Motorola has been providing consumers with rehashes of the RAZR with models like V3i, V3r, V3a, Ve, V3c, V3m, V3xx, and V3t. And while the RAZR2 is slimmer, it is not doing as well as expected given how phenomenally well the first RAZR sold.

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Despite working at Wirefly, I have a very old cell phone. I’m just not the sort to go looking for a new cell phone when the old one works well enough. Recently however, my carrier, Sprint, sent me a letter explaining that my antique cell phone was so old, that soon it would no longer function in some areas.

Like many people, I need my phone, so I began the (rather fun) process of deciding on a new one. At the same time, though, I started trying to figure out what was the best way to dispose of my old cell phone. I am not the “greenest” of people, but lately I have been trying to change my environmental habits and go green.

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