Do smartphones equate to more Internet usage on the go?

Smartphone users tend to utilize the internet on their mobile device more than users of feature phones, according to a University of Maryland study about how mobile phones are used.

“It did increase how much people were able to get on the Internet,” Melissa Moore, one of the researchers performing the study, said of mobile phones. Moore, who zeroed in on the relationship between mobile phones and the Internet through a survey crafted by her research group, said that users’ decision to get a smartphone was affected by their ability to e-mail and engage in social networking on the go. Moore also said that users tend to utilize applications on smartphones once they get an appropriate data plan.

Moore found areas of study that were statistically significant, including how often users get on the internet after a phone upgrade/update, how much users utilize their data plan for receiving mobile news after an upgrade/update, and how inclined users are to utilize the internet on their phones after an update/upgrade. About 81 percent of the respondents said they used the internet on their updated phone often or very often, with about 79 percent of 149 respondents said an updated phone required a new data plan. About 65 percent of 150 respondents said they were more inclined to use the Internet once they upgraded their phone, with about 11 percent saying they were somewhat more inclined to use the Internet.

Moore originally thought journalism students would utilize applications on smartphones more often than students from other majors – that didn’t turn out to be the case. Moore found in her survey that a lot of college majors utilized applications; students one particular major didn’t use applications a lot more than students from other majors.

But the research group’s survey – which totaled 20 questions – didn’t go off without a hitch, as she said there were multiple complications with the survey that led to less than ideal results. Moore said that after first issuing the survey, her research team found problems with the survey and had to re-distribute the survey a second time. But Moore found that participants’ motivation for answering the question may have been skewed – the group offered a $15 gift certificate to a random respondent of the survey, which Moore thought led to some of her questions being skipped by some respondents.

Moore said that there was a lot of previous research done on this topic. One of the big conclusions drawn was by Roger Entner, Senior Vice President of research and Insights at Telecom Practice, who found through a 2010 Nielson study that smartphones will pass feature phones in usage, with the Internet being the main reason why. In fact, a 2010 Mobile Marketer article found that even some smartphones are looking like old devices – including the Blackberry in comparison to Verizon Android – in terms of the ease of Internet and application usage.

However, one last effort by providers of feature phones seems to be underway in order to make feature phones attractive options by giving them smartphone features. Jared Newman of PCWorld discovered that AT&T tried to promote its Quick Messaging phones through features such as enabling the sharing of photos and videos through social networking.