How the smartphone is killing the PC

The smartphones in our pockets are far more powerful than the desktop computers we dreamed of in the 1980s. This year they are outselling PCs – and soon they could replace our wallets as well When he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes last summer, Tim Smith was given a blood sugar monitor, and a notebook with a pencil. The monitor, obviously, to test his sugar levels; the notebook to note them down so he could tell his doctor. Given his job in IT for Sainsbury’s, Smith wasn’t about to use something so low-tech as pencil and paper. “I would have lost it or torn it,” he says. A few years ago, he says, he probably would have taken the readings and entered them in an Excel spreadsheet on his PC, to make pretty graphs. But this was 2010, and so he turned to his smartphone, and quickly found an app – Glucose Buddy – that let him take his readings anywhere he liked. They’d be uploaded to the internet, so he could access them any time. Graphs? Of course. Alarms to remind him to take a reading? If he wanted. Advice on diet? Available for a cheap upgrade to the free app. Smith is just one of the millions of people around the world who now own a smartphone, and the number is growing rapidly. In the first three months of this year, just under half of all the 45m mobile phones sold in western Europe fell into that category – able to browse the web, send and receive email, and run custom-written apps. That’s as well as storing contacts and calendars, sending text messages and (how quaint) making phone calls. Worldwide, smartphones represent 24% of all mobiles sold worldwide between January and March – up from 15% a year before. The tipping point when they make up 50% may only be a year or so away. And before the end of the decade, every phone sold will be what we’d now call a smartphone. Smith’s use of his iPhone is typical of the way smartphones are used: to connect to the internet, hold data, run programs, organise our lives. They’re fast replacing what we perhaps wrongly thought was an embedded part of our lives: the PC. Notice what Smith, an IT professional, didn’t do: he didn’t use a PC, and he didn’t fire up Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program. 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 most mobile handsets and smartphones. 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

Posted by on June 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.