Drilling Down: Phones’ Texting Feature Often Unused

clipped from www.nytimes.com In a recent survey of people from 11 countries, South Koreans were the second most likely to own cellphones with e-mail capabilities. Sixty-nine percent of the South Korean respondents had such phones, compared with 89 percent of Japanese respondents, who came in first. But South Koreans were among the least likely to use the e-mail function if they had it: only 10 percent of them did, compared with 56 percent of the Japanese. Across all countries surveyed, the study found that people used text messaging a lot, or not at all. In the United States, for example, 82 percent of cellphone owners said that they never used text messaging, 3 percent said that they used it monthly or less, and 15 percent said that they used it every week or even more. South Korean cellphone owners were also less likely to use text messaging than Japanese owners, so it did not appear that they were texting instead of e-mailing.