"The popularity of non-PC devices, including media tablets, such as the iPad, and smartphones, took consumers' spending away from PCs," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.
Computers are still selling but more slowly and smartphone sales are increasing. Last week, US network Verizon said 39% of phones on its network were smartphones and half of phones sold in the last quarter run the Android operating system.
Putting the difference into perspective, analyst Horace Dediu noted last week: "There are currently 1.5billion global internet users and at least 5.5billion global cellphone users."
Technology is even more invasive in our lives than it was five or 10 years ago. It's due to the evolution of a range of factors: specifically, increased processing power, cloud-computing and faster broadband. Add in the surge in mobile devices such as smartphones and mobile internet speeds.
In the past two weeks, Apple launched its answer to Google's services and called it iCloud.
The major player in cloud-based services is actually Amazon, which spotted this trend before anyone else and built the vast data centres and server farms that are the backbone of our new world. It hosts Dropbox, the clever, Freemium storage system we use to run Stuff magazine, for instance.
The Silk browser included in its new Kindle Fire tablet is a clever combination of server-side and client-side processing (the old IT names for the cloud and whatever device you're using). Silk does the heavy crunching on Amazon's servers and then pushes it to the Fire. If you haven't heard of push technology, then no one has explained to you how your BlackBerry works.
The champions of this new cloud world are obviously Google, whose Android smartphone-operating system is an attempt to extend its dominance in the burgeoning mobile market. A very good attempt. Android is getting about 500000 activations a day, said Google's head of mobile, Andy Rubin.
It's going to be the Windows of smartphones and, perhaps, of tablets. Set-up involves fewer steps, including putting in your Gmail username and password. A quick sync and you're away.
The one major player desperately trying to jump the shark, or trying to stay relevant, is Microsoft. Despite being a cash cow and selling 90% of the operating systems on new computers, Microsoft is behind in the mobile space, where smartphones now outsell computers, and Android is moving into a position of strength by virtue of its volume.
This week, Nokia is expected to unveil its Windows Phone 7 devices at the Nokia World Conference in London. It announced the switch to the operating system of its former foe in February.
BlackBerry, which is still the gold standard of mobile e-mail despite gains by other manufacturers, is also making a belated push forward with a new operating system called BBX, announced last week. It combines the excellent QNX that runs the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and is sorely needed to keep the original mobile e-mail device in the running.
Source is
http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2011/10/24/androids-taking-over-the-universe
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