In your opinion how many people today own and use a smart phone?

The majority of people, young and old seem to have them, although I have access to no statistics. Well, there are probably less older people that have them, but my grandma has one anyway.

About 56% of American adults according to this study. And by 2016, it is predicted that there will be two billion smartphone users worldwide (so more than ¼ of the Earth’s population).

Of the people I hang around with (ages 16–65) I’d say about 7 out of 10

Of the people I know, probably 9/10. In the U.S., maybe 6/10. More than 50% of people over 13 years of age, certainly.

I’m just gonna say lots

@ucme Not lots and lots??

@SQUEEKY2 No, what you got there is an auction.

It seems like of people who I know that are over 70, the majority have dumb phobes. Of people who I know who are under 70, probably 9 out of 10 have smart phones.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield‘s study was from 2013, I believe. It’s got to be much higher now. And it certainly depends on age.

In my experience, 100% of people in my profession (software) have smartphones. Even outside of my work, I would say that 90% of the people I meet have smartphones – the 10% only being some older people like my mother, and my sister (who is a luddite).

One of the last social functions I attended we ended up having a contest around the table to see who had the oldest phone. I won, with an original Razr, but it was a close call with 2 people still using the Motorola that replaced mine. I think out of the 8–10 people at the table, 1 had a smart phone.
We don’t have texting on our phone plan, much less internet. Honestly, I don’t really even know what a ‘smart’ phone is. In a rural area the expense makes a smart phone much less attractive.

This may or may not be a bit optimistic.

As about half the population of the US lives in cornfields and deserts where it makes little/no financial sense for them to build the cellular infrastructure to cover places that average less than one person per square mile (much of the Midwest) or where terrain would require more towers than a flatter area the same size (much of New England) it would seem that at least ¼ of Americans couldn’t get a smartphone if they wanted to. However, in urban areas, pretty much everyone over the age of 12 who isn’t a technophobe has one.

The people I know that prefer dumbphones or landlines tend to be old enough to have grown up before 8-tracks and unleaded gas, and often have worse computer skills than I had back in second grade when computers first started leaving the laboratories and entering the home. Off the top of my head, I’d say that that covers about ⅓ of what is left.

So when you take out those who can’t get 3G/4G cell coverage, the kids whose parents won’t give them one, and the old-fashioned people who are content with stuff that was deprecated a decade ago, I would guess that only about half of all Americans have a smartphone, though it may seem higher to those who live in cities where it makes financial sense to build a few towers to serve millions of people.

I know very few people who don’t own a smartphone. I don’t know about all those people in big cities on the coasts, but I’d say 9 out of 10 people that I know here in the rural heart of USA have a smartphone.

What percentage of the U.S. population is urban or rural? The urban areas of the United States for the 2010 Census contain 249,253,271 people, representing 80.7% of the population, and rural areas contain 59,492,276 people, or 19.3% of the population.

@ibstubro Certain states have all of their population in a small portion of their geographic area though, and a urban area that is surrounded by hundreds of miles of farmland is, for purposes of infrastructure, rural as it takes more pavement/wire/towers per capita to get them on the grid.
As someone who lived in a town that still lacked broadband and cell coverage over a decade after that stuff hit the only city in the county a mere 15 miles away (which itself was about five years after it hit the bigger cities ~50 miles away) I think it safe to say that Verizon and their peers have different definitions of “urban” and “rural” than the US Census.