From the Midwest redneck author of "The Rooster Crows at 4am!," "Lizard Poop!," and "The Philippines Expat Advisor"
Our Retirement Plans? We’re Moving to the Philippines! Bananas, Babes and Beer. Bruising Beijing Ban Baffles Philippines.
Two-thirds of Filipino Kids Own Cellphones
Two-thirds of Filipino children now own a mobile phone, according to a study conducted by leading kids’ channel Cartoon Network. If you ever shopped at any SM City mall in the Philippines, you would swear that figure is closer to 100%. I can't tell you how many times I've had to dodge kids at the malls (and adults) that have their eyes glued to their latest text message instead of watching where they're walking. When I'm not in one of my "what would Jesus do" moods I'll just stand there and let them bump into me. 
GMA News Online reports that the study, entitled “New Generations 2012,” revealed that mobile phone ownership among young Filipinos are now at 65 percent. This is higher than Australia’s 42 percent and almost triple Taiwan’s 22 percent.
BuddeComm, an independent telecommunications research site, pegged mobile phone penetration in the Philippines approaching at “approaching 100 percent,” and said that Filipinos send an average of 1.8 billion messages a day. I estimate my own asawa sends at least one billion of those daily messages ever since we got that unlimited talk and text package from SUN.
More than half of kids in urban areas of the Philippines have Internet access at home, 54 percent have access to digital cameras, 20 percent have smartphones, and 16 percent have tablets.
Ninety-nine percent claims to have watched TV—a third, or 38 percent, of them from flat panel screens. Our own niece and nephew, that now live with us outside our subdivision in Iloilo City, are among those 38% that watch from a flat panel screen.
The kids are on school vacation and position themselves in front of the only television in our house, located in our bedroom. To be honest, it's too hot for them to do too much else. Once they have their chores from the day accomplished, I'm happy to let them stare at the boob tube all day if they like. My only instruction to them: "Watch what you want, but do not repeat any bad words that you might hear that Uncle Dave also says."
While TV remains the top medium of choice for young Filipinos, Internet is fast catching up. According to the survey, 76 percent of children access the Internet, and 82 percent of those with Internet access at home go online at least once a week.
I'm online from early in the morning to late in the afternoon. My own asawa barely gets to look at her Facebook account once a week. I can guarantee you that our 12-year-old nephew and 14-year-old niece get absolutely zero computer time in our household.
Among Internet activities, online gaming claims the top spot, with 58 percent of Filipino children playing online games daily.
Social media comes in at second, with 52 percent logging on to various social media every day.
Forty-one percent listen to music, 36 percent stream videos, and 23 percent upload and share photos.
But while only 28 percent use the Internet for homework, a surprising seven out of ten respondents claim that they are regular book readers.
Thirteen percent read newspapers and nine percent read magazines.
This, the study notes, shows that “technology doesn’t always win out.”
The New Generations 2012 results were obtained from face-to-face, in-home interviews with 1,000 randomly selected kids from Metro Manila, Cebu, and Davao conducted between February 25 and March 26, 2012.
(Photo by benjieordonez © All rights reserved from Flickr.)
HEY KIDS! My Webmaster Supreme Rich Pawly, has informed me that he has started a complete backup of my site and will be making a move to a new server sometime this week. Rich tells me that PhilippinesPlus.com might not be accessible for anywhere from 2-72 hours, and there could be issues related to the changeover.
Rich promises the new server will enable the website to be downloaded even faster once all the changes have been made. Thanks to Rich for taking care of this. And thanks to my loyal readers for your patience. It's appreciated. .
Dave,
I can see the withdrawals coming if your down too long lol. That group of beautiful bikini clad filipinas is a good way to end this article. What resort was that at? Take care and please try to keep the down time to a minimum lol.
Hope the site won’t be down too long, Papa Duck. I’m looking to do some changes on it once the dust clears from the move. Sorry, but I had to remove the images from my most popular posts as it was really dragging down the download time to view the site. Maybe with the new server, I will be able to bring them back.
Glad you like the bikini clad beauties. What resort? IT was taken at Stakili Resort in Compostela Cebu. Here’s the link to the photo from Flickr.
Since most people don’t have land lines the cell phone it the way to stay in touch here in the Philippines. I have one but don’t use it much. It does have a nice flashlight built in and the clock works. Most of the time I don’t have a load.
I haven’t noticed any difference in the page load time with or without the photos
I don’t even have a cell phone now, Gary, but The Boss has two. Any messages I get from my expat drinking budies have to go through her. And she is always running out of a load on the one phone. We have a new Sun plan, 350 a month, that has unlimited Sun-to-Sun, that thankfully has a P1500 a month limit in case she forgets and uses her allotment for other carriers such as Smart. Know what kind of look I have when she forgets and uses another carrier on the Sun phone:
I use a web page optimizer, Lance. It was showing a 9% reduction in my web page score, from 97 to 88. The load time wasn’t that bad, but I’m experimenting with a new popular post gadget now and just trying to tweak it. Good thing I’m retired, it’ll probably take me hours to get it to how I want it. It’s not showing the hot babes I had on the other plug-in I was using.
Interesting survey about cell usage but without a sampling from most of the RP, it cannot be that accurate as it mentioned only 3 large cap centers were used for the survey. Anyhow, at least in the RP they are walking around bumping into things. Here in the states, they are driving, and, well…..everything you can imagine happens. I’m also thinking of going the way of Dave once I get settled…dumping my smart phone and using the asawa as my message center. I will always have fb.
I don’t use a cellphone in the Phils either. There is always my asawa or a brother- or sister-in-law handy to make a call or text for me. Just, “Hey, sis, please call so-and-so for me, and ask….” Easy!
Well, you’re right Randy, texting AND driving is certainly going to have more serious consequences than walking around in SM City reading and sending text messages while you are walking. How folks survived before the advent of the cell phone is beyond me. Hope you go my route, Randy. I have no problem having my asawa be my personal secretary.
My thoughts exactly!
That’s the way to do it, Ice Man.
Great minds think alike, Randy and The Ice Man.
No sooner did I close this post out, I located an article on a community that has just implemented “texting while walking” fines due to people being run over. It will never end!
http://www.iphonesavior.com/2012/05/fort-lee-new-jersey-bans-texting-while-walking.html
They are being referred to as “dangerous walkers”
Thanks, Randy, I saw a report about that on Fox News last week. More and more regulations and laws in America, yeah, that’s JUST what they need.
Hey, Randy, that could apply to me after I’ve had a few too many bottles of San Miguel Pale Pilsen.