Teenage females lead the way, averaging 3,952 messages per month. (Males: 2,815.)
Although teenage females (does anyone still call them girls?) lead the way in texting, teenage males consume more data. Analyzing the monthly cell phone bills of roughly 65,000 mobile subscribers, Nielsen discovered that males age 13-17 took in 382 MB per month while their female counterparts used 266 MB.
Overall, mobile data usage among teens of both sexes was up 256% over last year and growing at a rate faster than any other age group. See chart below.
The full report is available here. It's is a companion to the State of the Media report Nielsen released earlier Thursday that showed the extent to which Google's (GOOG) Android and Apple's (AAPL) iPhone dominate the U.S. smartphone market. See here.
In acquiring Beluga, Mark Zuckerberg has set Facebook's sights on cell companies' most overpriced service: text messaging.
Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap—unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.
In that giant MORE
Scott Woolley - Mar 4, 2011 10:50 AM ET
E-mail, text messages, instant messages -- Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the last mile between all the redundant systems and users' simple desire to see all their messages in one place.
By Chadwick Matlin, contributor
Mark Zuckerberg was just turning 13 when AOL Instant Messenger was released in 1997. Instant messaging was nothing new—AOL had allowed its users to chat with other subscribers since 1993, and ICQ had allowed anyone to MORE
Nov 16, 2010 8:44 AM ET