Sixty-eight percent of US adults now have a smartphone, while ownership of a number of other devices has dropped, according to a Pew Research survey released Thursday.
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The percentage of Americans who own an iPod or another brand of MP3 player changed little since 2013 (the last time Pew Research polled on ownership of this device).
Similarly, 41 percent of people who did not graduate high school own a smartphone, compared with 81 percent who have graduated college.
Global surveys have shown the smartphone market is still growing, led by emerging markets, while tablet sales are in decline.
While more than 80 percent of adults owned cellphones in 2011, smartphones weren’t almost as common, with only 35 percent of Americans owning an iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows phone or something similar.
The research centre said: “Device usage has notable social and cultural implications, and there are sometimes important political and macroeconomic consequences to the way people use their gadgets”.
The only group more likely to have a smartphone than millennials was people living in householdsearning $75,000 or more annually, Pew found. There, 87% had them. Now 45% of US adults say they own a tablet computer, up from just 4% five years ago.
Although the share of cellphone users slowly crept up to 92 percent of Americans this year, the percentage of those owning smartphones shot up to 68 percent.
Plus, 40% of adults still own an MP3 player, which is down from the high mark of 47% in 2010. Today, just over half have an audio-only device, according to Pew.
For tablet computers, the 2015 ownership figure of 45 percent is “statistically the same” as the 2014 level of 42 percent, the report said, noting decelerating growth since tablets became popular a few years ago.
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The results are based on questions asked during telephone interviews conducted in English and Spanish between March 17 and April 12, 2015 among a national sample of 1,907 adults (age 18 and older). The margin of error for the first survey was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
