Abstract:

Smartphones continue to play an essential role in our daily life, providing people with many services that were not available before on standard mobile phones. The increased features and computing capabilities of Smartphones have allowed them to replace other portable machines, such as laptops, for many users, but particularly for university students. The main focus of the study is to compare the results of two studies conducted in 2014 and 2017 to understand the information consumption and usage patterns of the smartphone devices among Zayed University students. A survey on both studies was designed and administered to collect data from students on campus(2014: 415 participants, 2017:305 participants). The new findings show that smartphone penetration rate is still 100 percent (99%) among students, with almost half of the students (48%) own and use 2 of more smartphones. The new results reveal that What's App and Snapchat are taking over Instagram as the most popular social media application, socialization is taking over communication as the most popular activity on their Smartphones. There has been a major shift in the usage trend of smartphones from 2014. Nowadays, smartphones were commonly used for sociliazation, communication, enertainment, with few usage for educational and academic purposes. Further more, minor significant difference on usage concemption, activities and trend has been noticed based on gender. As expected with the way technologies is rapidly changing and emerging, a new smart phone brand "iPhone" has emerged to replace the previous one "Blackberry" . In addition, the most recent results(2017) show more students(51%) using their native language "Arabic" for communication.