Why People Use Smart Phones

In recent ten years, smart phones have occupied an essential place in people’s daily life. Whatever 70-year-old men or 7-year-old children, people utilize smart phones through personal preferences. As a curious person, I detect that people use smart phones in distinct gestures. To be specific, most young people like me are used to touching the screen with our thumbs; on the contrary, many people in my parents’ generation like my mother may more often touch the screen with index fingers or even middle fingers. Therefore, I decided to pursue this question: why different generations choose different finger to use smart phone? This phenomenon deserves investigation because smart phone companies need information about finger usage of potential customers.

I searched for scholarly journal articles to find the answer. As M. H. Goadrich and M. P. Rogers (2011) clarify, the first smart phone in the word is IBM Simon which appeared in 1993. As M Izhar and M Malhotra (2014) declare, Apple's iphone in 2007 became the benchmark for touch-screen phones. According to information above, I speculated that people of different ages encountered smart phone at different stages of life. For example, as Zhou Yanfei (2016) claims, for 20-30 year olds people and even earlier generations, some homemade toys were fun for their children, and there were lots of finger usage games in rural areas (p. 1). They began to use smart phone after they have been skillful in writing letters and even utilizing keyboard. So they may touch smart phone screen in familiar gesture. On the other hand, people younger than 20 began to touch smart phone when they were children, so that they can try more and select the most convenient gestures they think of. Moreover, the faster mobile network, 5G has conducted off-site testing in five Chinese cities (Li Yuying, 2018).The news means that the update cycle of IT is really fast. And the development process of smart phones is more consistent with the growth of the younger generation. Similarly, I guess that the thumb usage in young generation is a reflection of fast and convenient information