Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will pop up their index finger.
But ask a youngster and they are much more likely to extend a thumb.
“Where texting is happening they use the thumb,” Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel’s ultra mobility group, told BBC News at CES.
For Mr Chandrasekher the change from index finger to thumb overturns decades of practice.
It shows the growing importance of mobile technology and how it can shift behaviour and who will be the big users of it in the future.
“The next generation of computer users is kids and the way they use it is totally different,” he said, adding that the mania for texting, mobiles and the net was a symptom of a larger shift.
“If you look at what’s happening underneath we think it’s about the internet and the internet becoming pervasive,” said Mr Chandrasekher. “People want it wherever they are.”
But, he said, few people seem to want to use a mobile phone, even a smartphone, to get at all their online stuff.
It might sound paradoxical but it took a lot of processing power to make a gadget’s graphical interface easy to use
Research by Intel suggests that 80% of people with a smartphone get frustrated when accessing the net with one.
The reason, he said, was because they only got a portion of what they were used to when they sat down in front of a desktop.
That frustration, said Mr Chandrasekher, helped to explain the growing interest in so-called netbooks – small machines that do a good job of connecting to the web but, before now, have lacked the processing horsepower of their laptop and desktop brethren… More at the BBC.
