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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Americans are ditching their landlines
Nearly three in 10 households in the U.S. have only a cellphone or they don’t bother taking calls on their landline phone because it’s probably a telephone solicitation or their landline is hooked up exclusively to a computer.
I cut off my land-line phone and my long-distance service last year because it was getting costly to support my family’s three cellphones with extension texting and calling.
The cellphone figures come from a survey by the Centers for Disease Control. They grew markedly since last year, when 16 percent of households only had cell phones and 13 percent had landlines but got all or nearly all of their calls on their cells.
The growth in cellphone-only use might be one of the reasons why Microsoft is aiming to take 40 percent of the smart-phone market with its Windows Mobile OS by 2012. It was in 11 million hand-sets in 2007 and is expected to reach 20 million this year.
Oh great, another device that’s going to be dominated by Microsoft!
