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Technology: Smartphones as a Computing Platform
While PC sales are starting to lag, smartphone sales are going into overdrive. Gartner found that PC shipments are slipping 6% this year to 274 million. Shipments of regular mobile phones is dropping too. In the second quarter of 2009, regular mobile phone sales saw a 6.1% decline from the same period last year. But sales of smartphones is growing rapidly, reaching more than 40 million units in the second quarter, a 27% increase over the same quarter last year. Ovum is forecasting smartphone sales to grow 23% in 2009, reaching 171.9 million units for the year. And a report by RBC predicts that there will be more smartphones than PCs by 2011.
Fred Baumhardt, a Microsoft executive, said that smartphones are entering the market four times more quickly than PCs. “While smartphones are twice as expensive as conventional cellphones, their prices have dropped significantly and within the next five years every mobile phone you buy will be a smartphone,” he said. And more affordable prices are accelerating the interest.
Smartphones can be used just about anywhere and that flexibility is making them extremely popular. But laptop and desktop computers aren’t on the way out just yet. The small form-factor of the smartphone is convenient when traveling but currently can’t match the range of capabilities of laptops or desktops.
Vendors are seeing the shift towards smartphones and retargeting their product focus. Dell, Intel and Nokia have all recently announced major initiatives with the smartphone. Similarly, software vendors like Microsoft, Google and Alfresco are tailoring versions of their software to work on mobile devices.
