It is no secret that not only have smartphones become an integral part of our lives, their emergence has also relegated an army of devices like calculators, radios, pagers, fax machines and even landlines. But if a recent survey conducted on women about their relationship with smartphones is to be believed, then digital cameras could be the next gadgets to march into oblivion. Influence Central’s Consumer Insights Group conducted a survey on five hundred women and asked them about the influence of digital technology in their lives and how many devices they owned.
To be honest, the survey didn’t really uncover anything which would make anyone sit up and feel surprised, except for the fact that a lot of women now consider their smartphones to be good enough to replace their digital cameras. This is because the Sony Xperia Z5 phone with a 24-megapixel Zeiss camera is considered as the top dog among smartphones with superior camera technologies when even lower-priced digital cameras offer resolutions much higher than 24-megapixels. As per the survey, the number of women who prefer smartphones over digital cameras to take photos rose from 37 per cent to 70 per cent over the last four years. What’s more, while one in every four women in 2012 confessed about not owning any smartphone with camera technology, the number of such women is down to just one in twenty this year. At the same time, the percentage of households owning two camera phones rose from 39 per cent to 45 per cent, those owning three camera phones rose from 8 per cent to 19 per cent and those owing four or more camera phones rose from a meagre 4 per cent to 19 per cent. Today, each household in the country owns 2.6 smartphones on an average.
The survey also revealed that while 35 per cent of households did not own landlines in 2012, 54 per cent, or more than half of all households do not own landlines today. The survey also highlighted that the percentage of women for whom smartphones are their most important items increased from 43 per cent in 2012 to 48 per cent in 2016 while the percentage of those women who considered their purses to be their most important items reduced from 31 per cent to 26 per cent in the last four years. Today, one in every two women uses her smartphone to connect to social media and to send texts, while one in three women uses smartphones to search the Internet and uses GPS to find her way. Because of such rise in the number of women using smartphones for various purposes, the relevance of gadgets like in-car audio players, GPS devices and OnStar systems has come down sharply in the last four years.
In January of 2014, security firm McAfee announced the results of a survey which it conducted on 1,500 men and women to figure out if they indulged in sexting on their smartphones. The results revealed that 49 per cent of adult men and women between the ages of 18 and 54 engaged in sexting and 77 per cent of them sent photos or sexual messages to their spouses. However, a 2015 Consumers and Wearables Report revealed that smartwatches aren’t really as popular among women as smartphones. As per the report, women constituted only 29 per cent of all smartwatch owners either because not many smartwatch designs were created specifically for them or because they considered smartwatches to be too big for their comfort.