Nearly ninety percent of American adults use a mobile phone and are encountering problems with them. A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that nearly three-fourths of mobile phone users experienced dropped calls occasionally.
The new survey also revealed that almost seven out of 10 American mobile phone users receive spam calls or text messages on their phone which happens at least once a week to 25 percent of cell users. This happens even amidst restrictions being implemented by Federal and State laws.
For people who use their cell phones to surf the Internet, slow data connections are becoming an even major concern. According to the survey, eight out of ten people who browse the Internet from their handsets encounter slow download speeds on an occasional basis and almost fifty percent encounter this problem on a weekly basis.
Figures from comScore revealed that less than half of all American mobile phones are Smartphone’s. The study by Pew revealed that the problems mentioned above are likely to be experienced by users of Smartphone’s than those using simpler “feature phones.” For instance, 35% of users encountered weekly dropped calls compared to 28% of feature phone users. Among Smartphone users, less than 30% receive spam text on a weekly basis compared to 21% of feature phone users.
Many non-smartphone in the market now include Web browsing, email, and other Internet-enabled features in their services. Surprisingly, feature-phone users have encountered substantially less problems when it comes to download speeds in contrast with Smartphone users. This may be due to the fact that the latter may have lowered their expectations for download speeds.
Among the different groups, the survey by Pew revealed that non-white cell phone users encounter all four problems at a higher weekly rate compared to their white counterparts. This may be attributed to the fact that African-Americans and Hispanics are not reliant on their mobile phones as their primary medium for calling and Internet access.
The research by Pew did not include the problem of poor audio quality when making voice calls. For many people, the quality of the sound when making a call using mobile phones is far worse than the quality of calls using a landline. It remains to be seen whether or not the dawn of faster 4G wireless carriers will solve this problem.
