Month: November 2015

GSG’s partner Enterprise Mobile has just published a blog post and solution brief on “dark mobile”, a term I coined in my capacity as GSG’s Platform Evangelist to describe that area of an organization’s mobile telecom environment that goes, unobserved, unknown, or unmanaged. Dark mobile is one case where what you don’t know can definitely hurt you — and your business. It can have negative effects on spending, management, security, and efficiency.

The good news is that dark mobile isn’t inevitable. A properly-managed mobile environment means that you know what devices, accounts, and users you have, which in turn means that you don’t have dark mobile, and aren’t troubled by its side effects.

I recently did a webinar on dark mobile with Enterprise Mobile, and we took its content and turned it into a blog post on their site along with a solution brief with Your Truly on the byline. Check them out, and find out what dark mobile means, and how you can counter it to avoid wasting money as well as facing administrative and security headaches.

A recent report from the Pew Research Center says that 68% of American adults have smartphones and 45% have tablets. With some groups, the ownership rate is even higher — among American adults, the smartphone ownership figure jumps up to nearly 90% for those under 30 or who live in households earning $75,000 or more per year.

The ownership rate for smartphones has doubled since 2011, and the rate for tablets has grown by 15 times since 2010. Over the same period, the ownership rates for some electronic products — desktop/laptop computers, and console/portable gaming devices — have remained flat.

Other once-hot categories of personal electronics, such as digital cameras and MP3 players, have seen their ownership rates decline thanks to smartphones and tablets usurping their roles. Consider the photo below, taken from a 1980s Sony advertisement. Every device that appears in it, other than the speakers and headphones, has been usurped by smartphones and tablets:

Some other observations based on the survey’s results:

• There’s been a slight drop in the rate of desktop/laptop computers in the under-30 set. In 2010, the ownership rate among adults under 30 was 88%; in 2015, that figure is 78%.
• The smartphone ownership rate for the under-30 set is almost the same as their desktop/laptop computer ownership rate for 2010. In 2015, 86% of adults between the ages of 18 and 30 owned a smartphone.
• After smartphones, computers are the next most popular personal electronic devices. 73% of American adults own a desktop or laptop computer, which is about the same rate of ownership in 2004 (when 71% of American adults owned one), but down from the 2012 high of 80%.
• If you consider the category of cellular phones, which includes smartphones and so-called “feature phones”, the ownership rate is 92%. This is a leap from just over a decade ago, when Pew’s survey reported that 65% of American adults owned a cellular phone.

To find out more about the survey results, you can download Pew’s full report [823KB PDF] free of charge.