• Reuters, Monday, April 2, 2012 12:11 PM

What are wealthier smartphone users doing with their devices? For starters, playing fewer games and sending fewer tweets than the general population, reports Reuters, citing new research from The Luxury Institute. Rather, these consumers -- who earn an annual income of at least $150,000, and tend to be older, with a mean age of 52 -- prefer news, travel and finance apps, according to a new study.

"As you get older and have family and significant others, aging parents, and a lot more assets and investments, you're going to need apps for far more relevant things than playing games and chatting with your peers," says Milton Pedraza, CEO of The Luxury Institute. As Reuters notes: “The findings are in contrast to smartphone usage as a whole, which research firm Nielsen showed is dominated by games and social networking categories.”

The wealthy do use Facebook and Angry Birds, but, overall, they tend to use apps for entertainment far less than the average smartphone user. As the smartphone market has flourished, a wealthy consumer is now only slightly more likely to have a device than your average Joe. Yet, as Nielsen recently found, the breakdown of devices owned differs considerably. For one, 45% of wealthy smartphone users own an iPhone, while Nielsen found that overall Android had 46% of market share.

Read the whole story at Reuters »