pew

The holidays were certainly prosperous for the tablet industry.

The number of U.S. tablet owners just about doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between the middle of December and the start of January, according to a Pew Internet report out today.

Coming from a period of flat growth since the summer, tablets enjoyed a surge during the holiday season as lower-cost devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook tablet reached shoppers just in the nick of time.

But tablet vendors weren't the only ones on a holiday hot streak.

E-book readers … Read more

App users are a tight-fisted bunch, according to a recently released Pew Internet & American Life study. Pew reports that only 46 percent of U.S. cell phone and tablet users who have downloaded apps have paid for one.

That means that 16 percent of adults in the United States have paid for an app. That's a boost from the 13 percent polled by Pew who reported parting with their cash in May 2010.

Pew queried 2,260 adults over the age of 18 between July and August of this year, including 916 interviews conducted over cell phones. The numbers might not look so rosy for app developers who would much rather have paying customers than freeloaders.… Read more

A new study entitled Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Networks confirms much of what we already know about cyberbullying. Most kids aren't bullied and most kids don't bully either online or off.

In fact, the study--conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project for the Family Online Safety Institute and Cable in the Classroom--concluded that "[m]ost American teens who use social media say that in their experience, people their age are mostly kind to one another on social network sites." Nearly seven in ten (69 percent) of teens said that peers are mostly … Read more

More than half of all tablet users consume the news on a daily basis, but most are still unwilling to pay for it.

A study commissioned by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Economist Group found that around 77 percent of tablet owners use their devices each day, spending an average of around 90 minutes in total.

Reading the daily news turned out to be the third-most popular use of tablets; 53 percent of those polled said they read the news daily. The only more popular activities were browsing the Web (which 67 percent do … Read more

More of us are letting our thumbs do the talking.

According to a new Pew study, 83 percent of American adults own cell phones and 73 percent of them send and receive text messages. Pew surveyed more than 2,200 people and asked those who text to cite their preferred way of being contacted on their cell phone. Almost a third--31 percent--said texting, while 53 percent said they prefer a voice call and 14 percent say it depends on the situation.

Texters in the 18- to 24-year-old range are likely to have the most buff thumbs. Pew finds the average young adult in that range sends or receives an average of 109.5 texts per day, or about 3,200 per month. About a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds fit into the hard-core 100-plus-texts-per-day demographic. The median texter in that age group sends or receives about 50 texts a day.… Read more

Foursquare and similar location-based check-in apps might sound silly to some, but they're gaining in popularity nonetheless.

A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that at least 28 percent of U.S. adults have found a liking for mobile and social location-based services.

Kathryn Zickuhr, a Pew Internet Project research specialist and co-author of the report, explained in a statement:

Americans are not currently all that eager to share explicitly their location on social media sites, but they are taking advantage of their phones' geolocation capabilities in other ways. Smartphone owners are using … Read more

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Friday, August 26.

• As Hurricane Irene approaches and East Coast residents are on lock down, CNET offers up some of the best ways to track the storm online and even through smartphone apps.

• Apple has ditched the 99-cent video rental plan, which was offered through Apple TV and iTunes. Why? CNET's Greg Sandoval said, "The Hollywood studios and TV networks don't want another Netflix. Look around. They're trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle.&… Read more

One of the many findings of a recent Pew Research Center study called "Americans and their cell phones" is that "42 percent of cell phone owners used their phone for entertainment when they were bored."

The study also found that 40 percent or respondents have used their phone to deal with an emergency and that "13 percent of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them." For more, see Eric Mack's post "Ever faked a cell phone call? You're not alone.&… Read more

Almost a third of all those twentysomethings you see walking around talking on their cell phones are just pretending--perhaps so they can avoid you.

That's one of the findings of a new Pew Research Center study that surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults about their cell phone usage habits. Thirty percent of survey respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 said they had used their phone to avoid interacting with the people around them at some point in the last 30 days.

When expanded to cell phone owners of all ages, only 13 percent pretend to be on the phone to get out of unwanted small talk or confrontations with the landlord.

We probably shouldn't be surprised that so many of those calls in public are just for show, because who actually makes a call instead of texting these days?

Pew found that 92 percent of smartphone owners and 59 percent of other cell phone owners text from their phone. Sending and receiving texts is the most common use for cell phones outside of voice calls, tied with taking photos. But only 80 percent of smartphone owners and 36 percent of feature phone users actually send those photos via their phone.… Read more