Internet Pulls More Users From Non-PC Sources
Not only are more consumers accessing the Internet with each passing quarter, they are doing so from non-personal computer sources such as handheld devices and television set-up boxes and WebTV, according to a new survey from Zona Research, the market analysis arm of Austin, TX-based IntelliQuest.
According to the survey, 83 million adults (40% of the U.S. population age 16 or older) accessed the Internet in the first quarter of 1999, up from just under one-third in the first quarter of 1998. Of these, 3.7 million used a handheld computer and 3.1 million used a television set-up box. In the third quarter of 1998–the first in which the trend was tracked–those figures were 3.4 million and 2.6 million, respectively.
An additional 41 million indicated plans to go online at some point in the future: Half of this group do not currently access the Web at all. Just over 17 million said they planned to go online within the next year.
Personal computers “will remain an important Internet access staple, but we believe the driving force of the Internet’s continued growth will be the wide availability of non-PC devices that can access information from most any location in the world,” said Clay Ryder, vice president and chief analyst of Zona Research.