The future of mobile (Dashboard)

N2IT

The Future Of Mobile [DECK]

This is a pretty nice presentation. Check it out.

Obviously it predicts what we are assuming. But it's nice to have a dashboard of quanitative data to back it up.

ptilsen

Very interesting stats in there. I have two very serious responses.
1. My Words with Friends play will not be significantly impacted by Draw Something. Both are fun, and both involve waiting for others to take their turn.
2. My reaction to some of the statistics and this topic in general is to point out that while tablets, smartphones, apps, and the like are fun and useful, ultimately laptops, desktops, and thin clients providing desktop-like-experience are not going anywhere. I mean that, exactly -- they aren't going to increase in prevalence, nor will their presence in our lives significantly decrease. There are some tasks that must be done on a computer -- one running Windows, at that -- and many, many, so-damn-many-it's-staggering tasks that are simply much better on a computer. I could enumerate these tasks until I can't think of any, filling a lot of text, then sleep on it and think of more. Ultimately, though, most of them come back to a few key commonalities:

A. Typing. I log into my computer, and I can type. On a real, full-size QWERTY keyboard. Even my fondest memories of Blackberry before I switched to iPhone are of being able to type at less than half the speed I can on a keyboard (which is saying something, because I could type fast on that BlackBerry). It was just enough to make typing short-to-not-quite-medium-length emails reasonable. Tablets can come with keyboard accessories. That's great, but the typing experience on the best implementations is still inferior to that of a netbook that costs less than and outperforms the tablet -- and has a smaller footprint (or a larger one, if you want the screen and keyboard space). Which leads me to...
B. Screen real-estate. Despite my problems with A., I often overcome them when using an iPhone or tablet. What can't be overcome (at least without neural output devices -- give it 30 years or so) is how damn small the screens are. Sure, I can view an email on a phone and a book or movie on a tablet, but combination of documents, RDP sessions, maybe full-screen games or line-of-business applications on multiple, high-resolution monitors simply cannot be beat (again, sans neural interfaces).


So, while I acknowledge the trend towards mobility and its huge impact on the market and really, society as a whole, I have to disagree with a lot of the implications (and sometimes explicitly stated predictions) of full-scale computers running generalized operating systems (Mac, Windows, and most Linux). Smartphone growth is huge, but as even this article points out, it's mostly just that people own phones. As they get cheaper and cheaper, there's little reason not to switch to a smartphone.

I'll use my phone when I'm out and about and my tablet in bed or on an extended trip, but at the end of the day, I'm returning to my PC, which is still better for gaming and productivity than my PS3, iPhone, and tablet combined, multiplied by seven, and squared.