A new U.S. online survey titled Teen Topix has released the results of their study on young consumers aged 13-17 years and their mobile phone preferences and behaviour.

When question on the key benefits of their mobile phones it was not surprising that ‘convenience’ comes out top with 77% claiming that the ‘convenience of being able to communicate from anywhere’ was the main benefit of their phone. This was closely followed by security of being able to reach family (75%) with friends’ admiration of their phone features (41%) and look (39%) trailing behind.

When asked specifically how cell phones made them ‘feel’, teens again opted for connected with friends (71%) and family (63%) over being fashionable (30%) or trendy (27%). 61% claimed owning a mobile phone made them feel ‘responsible’.

Unsuprisingly, the research found that of all the gadgets and devices available today, the mobile phone is a teen favorite but somewhat surprisingly 51% of teens said they “absolutely could not live without” their phones.

When asked about the features they have and use, text messaging was overwhelmingly cited as the feature they use most (72%), followed by the ability to customize wall paper (72%), take dpictures (63%), and play games which come with the phone (56%).Lower on the list was downloading music (36%), and downloading videos (22%).

Despite the large number of hand-me-down phones and those with low functionality 41% claimed in the survey that they have video downloading capability on their phones and approximately half of those teens are actually downloading and viewing videos.Among these teens claiming to download video, music videos are the most watched type (67%), followed by user generated content (27%), full length TV shows (24%) and clips from TV shows (24%).

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