Smartphone penetration stood at roughly 60% of the US mobile market in Q2, according to recent reports from comScore and Nielsen. That still leaves a sizable 40% chunk of the mobile market that hasn’t yet made the switch. So who is still using a feature phone? The demographics of the feature phone user are broken down in a new study [download page] released by Jumptap. As one might expect, the typical feature phone user tends to be older and come from a lower-income household.
Data from Jumptap and comScore suggests that almost half of feature phone users in the US are aged 55 and older, with one-quarter of users belonging to the 65+ group alone. By contrast, just 24% of users fall in the under-35 age bracket.
When it comes to household income levels, fully 43% come from households with annual income levels of $20,000 or less. Less than 1 in 5 feature phone users have annual household incomes levels of $50,000 or higher.
The data also indicates that feature phone users are more heavily concentrated in the South than any other region, and skew slightly male (53%). Roughly three-quarters of feature phone users are customers of T-Mobile (42%) or Cricket (34%).
Turning to connected devices, the report shows that between July 2012 and July 2013:
- The iPhone gained 9.6% points in market share on the Jumptap platform, extending its leading share to 41.4%;
- The Samsung Galaxy S improved by 3.8% points to reach 13% share;
- Apple slipped by 0.5% points to 56.8% of brand market share, while Samsung gained 5% points to 21.8% share of the handset manufacturer market;
- Apple’s iPad increased its tablet market share by 3.1% points to 70.1% share, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab more than doubled its share to reach 11.1%;
- Applications’ share of requests increased by 9% points to 84%, as the mobile web’s share dropped to just 16%.
About the Data: he Jumptap MobileSTAT reports mine large quantities of network data to identify targeting and audience trends. Jumptap uses proprietary algorithms to analyze and normalize this data. In some cases, when sufficient conditions are met, subsets of data may have been used as proxies to represent the overall network.
