Ever notice
how easy it is to find mobile plans with
unlimited minutes these days? Yeah, it's because they're about as valuable as pea coats in the dead of summer. With
more and more consumers
disconnecting their landlines in favor of using their cellie for everything, the art of communicating via voice is also becoming lost. According to "government and industry data" cited in a
New York Times report, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has "stagnated," with 2009 being the first year ever in which the "amount of data in text, email messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices [in the US] surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls." Dan Hesse, Sprint's head honcho, even chimed in with this nugget: "Originally, talking was the only cellphone application; now it's less than half of the traffic on mobile networks." We also learned that the average length of a mobile call was just 1.81 minutes in 2009, a drop from the 2.27 minutes per call seen in 2008, with many individuals feeling that other communication methods (email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) were far less invasive of someone's time, being that they could respond to those messages at their convenience. Of course, on the Upper East Side (where all the richies use Verizon dumbphones, apparently), we get the impression that yakking away about a cornucopia of drama is still the hotness.
posted May 14th 2010 6:01PM
No Kidding!
- Sent from my Droid
@furquanatique
why didn't Nilay write this post? Its his favorite show!
@furquanatique
I would talk more if AT&T's network didn't blow so much.
Sent from my PC
Nate used Android last time if I remember correctly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuW3bdsoRV0
@Boyo
How embarrassing must that be to hold that record? That guy has no girlfriend, for sure.
@SeeKo I think you have that backwards. That is exactly the type of skill required for juggling multiple women ..
@Boyo My little 17 year old sister is faster than him and sends about the same amount of text messages. I'm probably faster than him depending on the phone. I wonder how he'd do on a qwerty keyboard. I rarely text though, average about 500 messages a month. I am more of a messenger [MSN, Trillain, ETC] person. I write about 3 novels in the course of a few weeks.
@Evolyptic
"I rarely text though, average about 500 messages a month."
I don't even know how to comment on that contradiction.
@SeeKo
well, some people don't consider that very much. I do about 2500 a month, so that's pretty small by comparison.
@TheKingOfHyrule
Yeah, I guess I need to rethink my definitions of "rarely" and "small". ;-)
@SeeKo
Don't worry, 500 to me is a lot and that's my primary communications method. My SMS count p/mo is 200 ish.
500 to my wife is nothing. Pittance. She blows through that by 1/2 point of the month.
@SeeKo I sent 125 messages last month. I forgot to put max in there somewhere. Normally it ranges from 0 to 500 depending on if I want to text people. 500 compared to my sister is extremely small. Hell, 2500 looks moderate. Last months bill said she texted 6000 times. Though she doesn't write on blogs and messaging programs like I do so in the end I end up communicating more through fonts than she does.
@TheKingOfHyrule 2500 isn't alot either, I send around 10,000 a month
@Airjord
Assuming you don't text while sleeping, you say that you send a SMS every 3 minutes of every waking hour, every day!?!?!??! WTF!?
@SeeKo Exactly my thoughts. What about work, sleep, food, bathroom.... I don't think soon.
..."... Dan Hesse, Sprint's head honcho, even chimed in with this nugget: "Originally, talking was the only cellphone application; now it's less than half of the traffic on mobile networks." We also learned that the average length of a mobile call was just 1.81 minutes in 2009, a drop from the 2.27 minutes per call seen in 2008......"
yeah - because you get disconnected every 2 minutes on Sprint's pile of junk network !!!
@TechnoHippie
My father had Sprint for over 10 years and had NO issues with them. He travels around the country regularly. He would know....
@SolidSnake well I was on Sprint for 11+ years and traveled all over the USA with it. While *most* of the time my sprint service did work - there was a great deal of the time that I would make a call & then be disconnected after less than 2 minutes. This went on for YEARS - tried new phones and everything. Plus Sprint screwed up my monthly phone bill 83 months IN A ROW. Sure they would always fix it - but not until I called & complained. The day I got rid of Sprint was a great day for me.
@TechnoHippie
They screwed up your bill for 7 years? I congratulate you on your perseverance.
Something about Gossip Girl? Where's Nilay?
@AckbarsFist
Watching Gossip Girl obsessively, of course...
Hahahaha it's cause old people only know how to use cell phones to make calls or that number would be way lower
Plus people can communicate clearer through email and text messages. Have you heard some people talk on the phone? I can hardly understand those people. I type my messages out with the exception of lol, lmao, and other nice abbreviation. However, I can read TXTSPEK just fine.
! @1$0 7@1|< !/\/ 1337 $|O3@|
so if people are talking less and less on their phone, what makes everyone so eager to video chat? that's even more intrusive and annoying than just talking.
front facing cameras will be a fail.
@onemadrssn
who is eager to videocall?
Front cameras already have been a fail
This right here
Bad: People will become even worse at being a conversationalist and become less personal and more impersonal.
Good: Being and remaining a good conversationalist will become an EXTREMELY valuable trait a person can have.
Just sit and wait.
@P Z It is like we're all rich celebrities but without the money?
@P Z
Not entirely true. We only need to look at the rest of the world whose data use has outstripped voice use for many years already. Comms via data is only a form of remote communications. People still know that very important things still require face to face, a voice call if necessary.
Data/SMS is great for filling in general communications needs. It doesn't supplant conversations. Some will argue, and probably rightly so, that the new age of communications actually enables conversation just as the internet, rather than separate humanity, has brought it together; many voices, one conversation.
Cell phones extinct about 7 years ago. People (well at least Wikipedia) now calls them smartphones
Good thing you tagged that Gossip Girl screencap. Wouldn't want someone else taking credit for it.
so this explains why data plans are so expensive? no, does it :(
i don't understand the title
@ianhouser
Took me a while, too. Replace the comma with "and". It's a convention used in newspaper headlines.
This is why I love engadget. Posts including Gossip Girl :) And I am being totally serious, No sarcasm.
We don't get these unlimited plans for pretty much ANYTHING except texting/mms in Canada. There's no such thing as unlimited data, and unlimited voice only comes in the form of 5-10 pre-selected contacts.
With this in mind, how long is it going to be before we get HD voice calls?
I make calls for emergencies only. Everything else I use is data.
Outta my 450mins on the Moto Droid, I only use like 10mins. As of txt'ing.....avg like 14,000 a month. Gotta luv that Unlimited Data.
@RealGame22
You are fricking crazy. I have the same plan, and the same phone, but i do 50 minutes a month, 1000 mesages a month, and about 3 Gb average a month...
The iPhone should be renamed "iInternetDevice". I barely make 100 minutes worth of phone calls on my phone each month sometimes. It's just not that important to me (and it's my only phone too, no home phone).
The title of this article is written poorly. It doesn't make sense...not even by newspaper headline standards.
i use my phone, Nexus One, almost exclusively for data. i switched to a 700 minute plan, because i average 200-300 minutes a month in talk time, but have an unlimited data plan with unlimited messaging. it cost me $59 a month total and i dont have a contract(thank you tmobile!). last month i used 17gb of data. the average user uses far less, rarely exceeding 1gb. for comparison, my sister has a nexus one too, she used 300mb. also, i got rid of my broadband cable/internet and exclusively tether my phone for data. here, in nyc, its possible because tmobile has its hspa+ service up. i average between 2-5mbps data speeds. on top of that, tmobiles unlimited data plan is actually unlimited!
you guys have it lucky, from where I'm standing, holy f***ing sh** there's no way you can talk for 10 mins on the damn mobile and tell yer friends its cheap
It's all 1s and 0s. It's ALL data.
Tell me again why there is even a difference between data, voice and text?!?
Oh yeah, I forgot... so the carriers can screw their customers and somehow justify charging us 3X for the same thing. It should simply be a communications charge - that's it. No voice plan. No data. And certainly no separate text plan. Charge us $XX to transmit XX number of 1s and 0s each month no matter what form those 1s and 0s take.
I'm lucky if I use 100 minutes per month.
While I text a decent amount it's just annoying how some people absolutely refuse to call you anymore. Some things are just much easier to talk about in an actual conversation (or, god forbid, it's nice to just shoot the shit)
Nilay will be happy to see his favorite show is getting more coverage on engadget
Let's just agree to never use the word "cellie" in an Engadget article again.
I know I'm one of the people this article speaks of. I rarely use my cell phone to just talk. Sure I talk on my phone, but its usually a very quick thing so I can communicate with one of my family members. My whole cell phone use revolves around sms, web browsing, streaming music, and downloading apps. Pure data.