• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 14, 2010

Apps haven't quite killed the mobile Internet yet, according to a new study released Tuesday by The Pew Internet Project. Despite its suggestive title, "The Rise of Apps Culture," the report concludes that while apps are popular among a certain set of mobile users, most aren't that enthralled with Angry Birds, Foursquare, Evernote or any of the other hundreds of thousands of titles available for download on handsets.

Pew found that while 43% of adult U.S. cell users have mobile apps (mostly through pre-loaded programs), only 29% have downloaded an app. Adding in people who don't have cell phones, that works out to only 24% of adults being active app users.

Pew reports covering the Internet and mobile are typically comprehensive in detailing how Americans across a variety of demographic segments are using these technologies in everyday life. Lately, the nonprofit research outfit has ramped up its focus on mobile, with recent reports looking at the category in relation to social media, adult and teen use, and broadband.

But one missing aspect of the Pew studies is that they don't distinguish between smartphone and feature phone users. That's become an important consideration for marketers focusing on mobile because the former group, while smaller, tends to be more active in using apps, Web browsing and other mobile data activities.

Nielsen research on apps released yesterday, for instance, showed that about half of smartphone owners used social networking and navigation-related apps in the last 30 days, compared to about 30% of regular phone users. What's more, Nielsen has predicted smartphone penetration in the U.S. will overtake feature phones by the end of 2011. But even though the latest Pew study includes some of the Nielsen data on app use, the word "smartphone" doesn't appear anywhere in the report.

Why not? Aaron Smith, a research specialist at the Pew Internet Project, has previously told me the terms smartphone and feature phone haven't been included in surveys because of concerns they would only confuse people. True enough, nobody outside the mobile world goes around talking about "smartphones," so avoiding the term in a broad survey makes sense.

But why not ask people what kind of phone they own and then categorize it from there? Even then, Smith says they might get a lot of inexact responses like "I have a Verizon phone" or "some kind of Motorola." True again, but I don't think people are that unsophisticated about what kind of phone they use, since it's something they carry with them and use just about everywhere.

And if someone says he owns an iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid, or Palm device, then Pew can chalk him up as a smartphone user. It would be more time-consuming for the research firm but would ultimately provide deeper insight into mobile use. If that's not feasible for Pew, then it should at least incorporate smartphone-related data from Nielsen, comScore or other measurement firms into its widely circulated reports.