How Kids Use Mobile Phones

Millions of teens are now buying mobile phones, spending their allowances or their parents’ money on text messaging and surfing the mobile Internet for games, chat, and videos.

Furthermore, even preteens (12 years old or younger) have become daily users of mobile phones. As mobile phone use penetrates the younger population and becomes an even more integrated part of teen life, it also has a profound effect on how young kids and teens interact with each other, how they use the phone in a school or workplace environment, and how they play. According to data from mobile industry market research firm M:Metrics, there are 71.2 million users of mobile social networking services in the United States.

A majority of these mobile social-networking users are teens and college students using MySpace and Facebook, the two most popular social networking sites. Virtually all popular social networking sites have opened their services for access by people using mobile phones to upload content, retrieve content, and communicate with their peers. Accessing social networking sites from mobile phones is becoming an integrated part of a kid’s cyber-lifestyle.

Although social networking services are often dismissed as chats and blogs and games that are a waste of time for teens avoiding their homework, that isn’t necessarily the case.

The good news, according to a recent Grunwald Associates survey, is that most of the teens who enter social networking groups to connect with their peers often use the groups to discuss homework.