ACCEPTANCE OF MOBILE SERVICES Insights from the Swedish market for mobile telephony

The main purpose of the paper is to investigate young peoples’ perspectives on mobile services in order to shed light on the acceptance of mobile services. The knowledge of and interest in mobile services of individuals using such services is analyzed. A second objective is to investigate the reasons for using/not using mobile services. In-depth focus group interviews and secondary empirical data provide the main data. Concerning the youth’s general knowledge of and interest in mobile services, the results point to six things: young people show a low demand for many mobile services, there is a demand for extended, established mobile services, like SMS, the interest in the new services vary, there is low interest in active information search, there is little knowledge of the enabling technology, and the understanding of the pricing is generally low. As concerns reasons for and against usage of mobile services, results point to four central aspects: many individuals could present clearly defined needs for certain services, many indicated an interest in "community usage" of mobile services, they experienced the prices of mobile services to be a hinder for usage, and technology placed limitations on the usage. The paper discusses practical implications on the acceptance of mobile services.