To boomers, mobile phones are not a gateway to the Internet—yet. To them, the Internet is a source of information rather than entertainment, and that is also how they see their mobile phones.

A survey conducted by Millward Brown for Hallmark Channel showed that just 35% of a combined group of boomer and Gen X respondents (who also had cable or satellite TV) considered their mobile phone to be an entertainment device. More than one-half (52%) of the millennial respondents turned to their mobile phones for entertainment.

Given a choice of consumer electronic devices, boomer Internet users overwhelmingly chose PCs over mobile phones (51% and 21%, respectively), while the opposite was true for Gen Yers (47% and 38%), according to Accenture.



Boomers make fewer mobile phone calls per month than younger adults and teens. Only children and seniors make even fewer, according to Nielsen Mobile. Younger boomers average slightly more calls per month than older boomers (193 compared with 145), and send far more text messages (128 compared with 38).



One reason younger boomers text more often than older boomers may be the presence of children still in the household, or at least college-age children in the family. A study conducted by Opinion Research Corp. for Sprint found that 76% of boomers who text are sending messages to their children. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project noted in a recent "Networked Families" report, parents both single and married send text messages at higher rates than do those without children.