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The use of handheld devices such as mobile phones, portable digital assistants, and Blackberry has become pervasive in our everyday lives. Accessing Internet services through a handheld device is no longer a novelty (Adipat, Zhang & Zhou, 2011). Mobile Internet Services (MIS) provide users with wireless access to Internet contents and services such as text messaging, access to large social networks, personal banking, gaming, and much more (Kim & Steinfield, 2004). The main advantages of MIS are mobility and immediacy (Kim, Chan & Gupta., 2007): Internet access anytime, nearly anywhere.
Despite the significant investment of MIS providers, MIS usage is not without problems, not least of which is the tendency toward switching behavior (Ranganathan, Seo & Babad., 2006), with certain users migrating from one provider to another (Keaveney & Parthasarathy, 2001). Switching behavior has become a critical issue for MIS providers. In Europe, MIS switching significantly increased in 2011, with rates exceeding 41% in Spain, 37% in the Netherlands, 35% in Germany, 33% in France, and 32% in the U.K. (Oracle, 2011). Unfortunately, MIS providers cannot recover their investment costs and make a profit if users stop using these services (Kim & Steinfield, 2004), as revenues depend on both the number of new subscriptions and the number of continued users (Bhattacherjee, 2001). Thus, continued MIS usage is critical for generating steady market revenues and sustaining long-term profitability (Deng, Turner, Gehling & Prince, 2010). These realities underscore the importance of studying users’ MIS continuance intention.
In Information Technology (IT) research, MIS are considered as a contemporary IT (e.g., Deng et al., 2010) and studies pertaining to MIS continuance intention have been conducted using Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1989) for utilitarian motives, where continuance intention refers to the suite of behaviors that follow initial acceptance (Kim & Steinfield, 2004; Lee & Kim, 2005; Lu, Denz & Wang, 2010). Motives regarding MIS continuance, such as perceived usefulness and ease-of-use, directly affect behavioral intention in the TAM model. Although this model is useful in explaining behavioral intention, several extensions may be relevant to better explain MIS continuance intention in everyday life.