Background of the Study Essay

In the recent years, mobile phone usage has been in its rapid growth. 80% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone. Based on the statistics, there are 5 billion mobile phones in the world out of which only 1. 08 billion are smartphones. According to the research compiled by GfK Asia, smartphones have taken over the market for mobile handsets in Southeast Asia. Also GfK Asia says that in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and Cambodia, growth in smartphone use year over year ranged from 40% to as high as 400%. The smartphones market in the Philippines grew the fastest among Southeast Asian countries over the past year, which also recorded the fastest increase in market share versus feature phones. Most of the mobile phones nowadays are addressed as â€Å"Smartphone†; because they just not only provide original telephone features, but also various functions that can be done with other devices, such as PDAs or computers. Along with the smartphone fundamental capabilities to make voice call, video call, SMS, and MMS, smartphone have been repositioned as a ? new information medium (May & Hearn, 2005). These new functions make smartphones different from regular feature phones. Therefore, the society has slowly moved their cell phone purchasing decision to smartphone (Min, et al. , 2012). Smartphone technology is inevitably changing peoples’ behaviors; especially young adults using smartphone frequently today. CourseSmart, which is the world‘s largest provider of digital course materials and eTextbooks, found that university students can‘t go long without checking their digital devices, including smartphone, laptop and more (CourseSmart, 2011) University students are very in to checking their accounts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even sending emails etc. using smartphone with their web connection feature. Today, students are using their smartphones for nearly everything and they consume mobile information almost everywhere that allows them. Therefore, consumers are highly concern with technologies that they might change their devices from time to time. In other words, due to the advancement of technology devices can be easily replaced. Hence, for the smartphone manufacturers it is essential to know what factors that actually affecting purchase intention of smartphone among young adults.