Stereotypes have it that men are more into gadgets then women are, and that women like talking to friends more than men do. Now it appears the latter stereotype may have overcome the former.
A new survey suggests young American females are more likely to have a smartphone than their male counterparts. US smartphone users are 55% female, the only place among eight countries were there’s a female majority: the respective figure in India us just 20%.
Given that the Nielsen study looked exclusively at 15 to 24 year-olds, here’s the best explanation I can come up with for the US result. Reports have consistently shown that the male-female balance varies immensely depending on the operating system, with the iPhone skewing heavily towards women, and Android being a male-heavy platform.
Considering that pricing and monthly service requirement demands put most young people off smartphones (only one-third of Americans 15-24 have one according to the survey), my theory is that the iPhone does a better job of persuading people to get a smartphone in the first place than it does of winning business among existing smartphone users. Put another way, the desire for young women to specifically get an iPhone may be more influential than the desire for young people as a whole to get a smartphone of any kind.
Among the other findings were that, not surprisingly given the audience, price was the most important factor in choosing a handset for every country but Russia, where design and style took top priority. Among Americans, the second most mentioned factor was having a QWERTY input, though it’s not clear if the question specified simply that arrangement of keys or a physical keypad.
The latter might well be useful given another claim from Nielsen (which appears to come from a separate survey): that the average American aged 13 to 17 sends 3,339 texts a month (4,050 among just females.)
Frankly that seems hard to believe: Nielsen notes its more than six texts for every waking hour. Sure, some teens seem to never stop typing away on their phones, but it’s hard to imagine many do so at such a pace, let alone for it to be an average for all users. My guess is that this is the result of survey respondents simply being asked to give a figure and either exaggerating or overestimating. If not, well let’s just hope they are on unlimited texting plans.[source]
0 comments:
Post a Comment