How the Smartphone is overtaking the PC

Smartphones can be used to connect to the internet, hold data, run programs, organise our lives. In orther words, they're fast replacing what we perhaps wrongly thought was an embedded part of our lives: the PC. That's indicative of a huge shift that's coming to computing, and was behind Microsoft's $8bn splurge in May when it bought the Skype internet telephone service, and behind the rumours that Microsoft is going to buy Nokia, the Finnish company that makes the most mobile handsets and Smartphones.

Smarphones orgainse our lives

At the end of 2010, Smartphones sales had overtaken PC sales.  From October to December, six million more smartphones than PCs were sold. The gap has grown to 18 million in the first three months of this year.

The change that smartphones, (or indeed Tablets) bring is computing power in the palm of our hands or in our pockets. It is internet connectivity almost anywhere on earth that is 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 and 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 and navigate you while you drive. These are just a few of the many Smartphone uses. In fact, today's phones have about the same raw processing power as a laptop from 10 years ago. And every year the gap is narrowed.

Due to their size and ease of use, Smartphones are fast becoming relied upon as part of day to day life. Once making the transition to a Smartphone, it's difficult to imagine life without one.

Source
Guardian.co.uk