Eighty-three percent of American adults (83%) own a cell phone of some kind, and they use them for a variety of purposes. This opens up lots of opportunities for app developers - if only we knew exactly what they were doing with them?

More findings have emerged the from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a survey of 2,277 adults ages 18 and older in the U.S conducted by phone interviews in English and Spanish during April and May  2011.

The latest report covers the use of cell phones and among its key findings are that Smartphone owners (35% of all respondents) engage in many more activities with their devices than owners of other cell phones - an average of nine of those listed in the following table (click in the table to expand it) compared to 2.5 for more limited devices:

Owners of smartphones tend to use them extensively for online activities. The incidence of downloading apps, playing games, accessing social networking, uploading photos and videos and online banking among smartphone owner greatly exceeds that among owners of other cell phones:

The fact that there are still more owners of non-smart phones than smartphones means there is a still plenty of future growth to look forward to.

More detailed finding from the survey show that smartphone owners form a strong attachment to their phones for more than simply keeping in touch with others:

• Smartphone owners lean heavily on their phones for distraction and quick information retrieval - 79% of smartphone owners say that they used their phones to quickly access information they needed in the 30 days preceding our survey, and 72% used their phone to entertain themselves when they were bored over the same time period.
  
  
• Smartphone owners can be at a loss without their mobile devices -  34% had trouble doing something in the past 30 days because they did not have their phone with them.

More information:

Americans and Their Cell Phones