More specific information about how this age group and Generation Y
use their phones is provided in later sections of this article. To further illustrate how
popular mobile phones are, consider that in 2008 the US had 158 million landlines
compared with 271 million mobile phone subscriptions (ITU, 2009b). As the number of
mobile phone subscriptions has grown over the past five years, landlines have
decreased by approximately 24 million (ITU, 2009b). These statistics reflect
Americans' reliance on their mobile phones with 42 percent of users saying they
"cannot live without" them and 82 percent saying they never leave home without their
phone (Synovate, 2009