The Mobile Phone Generation Gap

Still using your phone for ... phone calls? Using your PC as your primary communications tool? That's so ... boomer!

Signs of the generation gap, as reported by eMarketer:

• "A survey conducted by Millward Brown for Hallmark Channel showed that just 35% of a combined group of boomer and Gen X respondents (who also had cable or satellite TV) considered their mobile phone to be an entertainment device. More than one-half (52%) of the millennial respondents turned to their mobile phones for entertainment."
• A separate study by Accenture found that "Given a choice of consumer electronic devices, boomer Internet users overwhelmingly chose PCs over mobile phones (51% and 21%, respectively), while the opposite was true for Gen Yers (47% and 38%)."
• Neilsen Mobile reports that 45-54 year olds send and receive an average of 128 texts a month ... while 13-17 year olds write and get 1,742. And those 128 are probably to family: Opinion Research Corp. found that "76% of boomers who text are sending messages to their children."

Remember how your parents used to emphasize that a call was long distance -- so it must be important (and expensive!) ... and at some point you realized that was silly? That's what your kids think when they see you writing email at the PC.