Category: Gadgets

A poll has now shown that retirees in Canada are likely to have cell phones, though not the latest tech.

A recent report making mobile commerce news has revealed that while the vast majority of seniors living in Canada are now using a cell phone, only a small number of them have changed those mobile devices to the more modern smartphone version.

The Media Technology Monitor report could prove to be important information for marketing and commerce.

The research was conducted over the phone with the participation of 6,014 English speaking Canadians. The interviews were held during the spring and fall of 2013, in order to help to track the trends regarding ownership and usage of mobile devices. This included measuring the movements of these gadgets among those within the senior demographic. For the purposes of this study, seniors were defined as individuals who were 68 years old or older.

Approximately 61 percent of the seniors who were polled said that they owned mobile devices.

In all, there were 774 seniors who participated within this research. Though only 61 percent of them said that they had cell phones, in the younger age groups, a much higher 87 percent said that they carried these gadgets.

Similarly, only a tiny 13 percent of seniors said that they owned smartphones, where a notably higher 63 percent of younger Canadians said that they carried these devices.

Among those that did have smartphones, seniors seemed to prefer iPhones the most, though only just slightly more than Android based devices and BlackBerry phones.

A miniscule 7 percent of the senior participants in this study said that they used their smartphones for connecting to the internet. Younger respondents responded that 54 percent of them connected to the internet using their gadgets. Furthermore, only 2 percent had ever tried to use social media on their devices. Among the younger users, about a third of smartphone users had done so. Around 17 percent of seniors had sent text messages at some point, whereas 76 percent of the other respondents said that they had.

Approximately 12 percent of the seniors polled had tablets among their mobile devices. Most often, this consisted of an iPad.

This mobile development from the Pentagon will secure a number of smartphone brands for war fighters.

Defense Department officials have revealed that the mobile development of a Pentagon system is being geared toward ensuring that a range of different mobile devices from different brands for war fighters will be mainly supported by BlackBerry as the tool begins its launch at the end of January.

The vast majority of these gadgets are going to be based on Blackberry, while the remainder will have other operating systems.

Officials estimated that 80,000 BlackBerry mobile devices, as well as 1,800 smartphones and tablets based on Android and iOS owned by the Defense Department would start to be connected to this new management system on January 31, 2014.

This is the latest step in the transition that began in 2012 to move toward mobile devices.

Two years ago, the Defense Department started to step away from wired workstation computers and toward more a more mobile access to information. This most recent effort is a considerable one in this process and it is wholly dependent on the proper functioning of this Defensewide system.

The project, which has an estimated price tag of $16 million , is meant to ensure that a possible 300,000 users within the department will not compromise military data on their smartphones and tablets. It has also been created to make certain that defense networks will not be corrupted while these individuals continue their information access while they are on the go.

Aside from BlackBerry mobile devices, it is expected that other popular gadgets to be included in this transition will be the iPad 3 and 4, as well as iPhones 4S and 5, in addition to the Samsung 3S, Samsung 10.1 tablets, and the RAZR line of products from Motorola.

In a statement, officials from the Pentagon said that “The new year will bring new mobile capabilities to as many as 100,000 DoD users.” They added that, starting on January 31, the department would be implementing version 1.0 of the unclassified mobile capability, and that it would then continue to expand the capacity of this management system to the point that it would be capable of supporting up to 100,000 users by the close of the fiscal year.