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Do you own a smartphone? If you do, it is either an iPhone or an Android. Recently, my husband bought an Android and it has dramatically changed the way he communicates. More importantly, smartphones can do much more than the desktop computers. Statistics show that sales for smartphones have outstripped computers this year.



According to THIS LINK:

In this shift, there was an earthquake at the end of 2010. PCs had always sold far more than smartphones (which only date back to 2003 or so). In the first three months of 2010, 85m PCs were sold worldwide, compared with 55m smartphones. Optimistic analysts forecast that the crossover might happen in 2012. Instead, by the last three months of 2010, 94m PCs were sold – and 100m smartphones. Analysts believe that this trend will never reverse. (It continued in the first quarter of this year: 82m PCs, 100m smartphones.)

"Smartphones will keep growing in sales approaching the billion-plus levels of total handset sales before this decade is done," says Tomi Ahonen, a former Nokia executive who now has his own mobile industry consultancy. "The trend of PC sales is stagnant or at best modest growth, selling around 300m per year."

Microsoft is concerned about what is happening with mobile, because it knows it is the future, and threatens the two PC-based monopolies – Windows and Office – that have earned it billions over the past couple of decades.

The change that smartphones bring is computing power in the palm of our hands or in our pockets. It is internet connectivity almost anywhere on earth. That's going to have profound effects. Horace Dediu, another former Nokia executive who now runs the consultancy Asymco, says: "Besides being powerful, they're going to be ubiquitous. Not only in the hands of nearly every person on the planet, but also with them, or by them, all day long. They will be more popular than TVs and more intimate than wallets."

They're going to do far more than wallets (although they can already serve that function: a system called NFC, for Near Field Communications, is being built into smartphones and will let you pay for small items with the press of a button). All the things you can now do with a smartphone would have seemed like science-fiction only a decade ago: translate signs, translate words, take voice input and search the web, recognise a face, add another layer to reality showing you the quickest way to a tube or restaurant or the history of your immediate surroundings, show you where your friends are in real time, tell you what your friends think of a restaurant you're standing outside, show you where you are on a map, navigate you while you drive, contact the Starship Enterprise. Well, perhaps not the last one. Even so, "A smartphone today would have been the most powerful computer in the world in 1985," observes Dediu. In fact, today's phones have about the same raw processing power as a laptop from 10 years ago. And every year they close the gap.

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In the meantime, do read:

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