While feature phone users as a whole skew older than the average population - possibly due to older users holding on to their devices - recent acquirers of feature phones skew dramatically toward the youngest users. This suggests that new feature phone acquisitions are being driven by teens acquiring their first devices.Teens may be getting feature phones as starter devices because parents don't want to pay the cost of smartphones or the data plans associated with them. However, as more and more value-priced smartphones are released, in combination with shared data plans and easier plan management, we may begin to see lower-end smartphones increasingly encroach on feature phones’ role as starter devices.
*Index of 100 indicates average representation among the mobile population.