The research study was conducted in Dharwad and Uttara Kannada districts of Karnataka state during the year2016- 17 to know the ownership and usage of mobile phones by rural youth. Ex-post-facto research design was used in thisstudy. For this study 120 girls and 120 boys from four different Pre University and Degree colleges were chosen. Thus total240 college going students were purposively selected for the study. The data was collected from the selected samplethrough self-structured schedule. The results showed that, there was a positive and significant difference between boys andgirls regarding usage, but there was no significant difference between boys and girls regarding awareness and knowledge ofmobile phones. The awareness index of mobile phone feature was very high with 93.98 for girls, 93.81 for boys and 93.90for the total. Cent per cent of the girls were at high awareness level whereas in case of boys 98.33 per cent were at high leveland only 1.67 per cent at medium level. None of the respondents were at low level of awareness. Knowledge index of girlswas 88.02, boys 92.80 and total 90.41 with respect to mobile phone features. Nearly cent per cent of the girls (99.17 %),boys (98.33 %) and total (98.75 %) belonged to high knowledge level. The total usage index of girls was lower (84.16)compared to boys (93.03). Majority of the girls (57.50 %), boys (85.83 %) and total (71.67 %) belonged to high usage levelfollowed by medium level with 42.50 per cent girls, 14.17 per cent boys and 28.33 per cent total respondents.