For this past year, for the first time, smartphone shipments were greater than PCs. There was a 62.7% increase from 2010 totaling 487.7 million units shipped in 2011 while only 414.6 million PC units were sold (including tablets). The huge increase in smartphone sales was driven by Apple’s iPhone which moved 37 million units in this past fourth quarter alone.
With smartphones starting to be available at lower prices with cheaper plans, more and more users are hopping on and enjoying the benefits of mobile internet, and apps. The growth of smartphones is a significant shift in consumer electronics, marking the greater versatility these new devices are offering. Rather than the original smartphones, which were predominately used as a palm pilot merged with a cell phone, the crave now revolves around app software and user interface.
People are still attracted to the conventional software PCs have to offer, but with the smart phone, consumers are becoming less reliant on having to use laptops and desktops. Think about it…the games smartphones now offer would have taken a powerful desktop to run 5-10 years ago…so unless you are into more in-depth games, you can amuse yourself with countless interactive games (such as words with friends, angry birds, etc).
If you look at it now, our smartphones are mp3 players, pagers, palm pilots, and mobile phones. It was only recently that real app software has started to be utilized, and now with the growing market demand there are countless app company start-ups. At the rate smart phone computing capacity is growing, I can very well believe that in 10-20 years rather than having a phone, laptop, tablet, mp3 player, and desktop, we will have one small and powerful device can be plugged into terminals that will enable the user to perform certain tasks. Instead of having to use a laptop/tablet for a bigger screen, there would be a terminal that you sync your smartphone to and enjoy the better visuals.
Things like the lapdocks that motorola make perform this task of powering a larger computer solely off a smartphone. In the near future with the increase in mobile processing power, people will be able to edit 1080p video and play high intensive games on machines powered solely by their mobile phones. The future seems to be of a large majority of people wanting their mobile devices to be as powerful as any stationary computer without the need of these dedicated PCs. With the expansion of high speed mobile networks, computing will never need to be stationary again.