Cell phone vs. PC
It’s been quite a while since the cell phone was just a voice communicator. Camera, games, music, personal data manager, email, texting, Web browsing- all of these and more are features that are available on various models of the so-called “smartphones”. In fact, the most advanced of these über cell phones are really small mobile computers.
In many parts of the world, the cell phone is the main device used to get on the Internet. As recently noted, the number of smartphones keeps growing and will soon exceed the number of PCs. For some time now, there has been speculation that the smartphone or some similar mobile platform would become the main device for personal computing and communication.
The speculation becomes closer to reality as the mobile platforms continually grow in power and utility. Already, the iPhone and its cousins are the main device for many. At Technologizer, Harry McCracken has a post called PC vs. Phone: Which Matters Most? He writes about a recent survey of smartphone users:
A quarter of the survey respondents said that they use their smartphones more than they do their PCs for business use. I’m not sure if that sounds low or high, but as smartphones get smarter over the next few years, you gotta think that many of us will come to see them as our principal computing devices, and consider traditional PCs to be the secondary, special-purpose gadget.
And at ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe asks, Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete? He thinks that not only the PC but also the present Web may be replaced. He writes:
There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
Technology always goes down surprising paths and what we will be doing 5 or 10 years from now, I won’t venture to guess. But it is hard to believe that the complex and ponderous Windows PC will continue to be so dominant. Some people see Google’s Android system as the coming thing. For an enthusiastic look at Android, see the Gizmodo post, Giz Explains: Android, and How It Will Take Over the World. A little hyperbole there, of course, but who knows?
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