Posted on 02/08/2011 10:32:45 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Manufacturers shipped more smartphones than personal computers in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to research, crowning mobile devices as the computing platform of choice earlier than many industry-watchers had expected.
Makers of mobile devices distributed a total of 101m smartphones in the last three months of the year, up 87 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to International Data Corp, the market researcher.
IDC had earlier said that PC shipments reached 92m units in the fourth quarter, up less than 3 per cent.
Analysts had expected smartphones to take the lead at some point in 2011, but the transition happened more quickly as a wide range of manufacturers of mobile devices embraced Android, the malleable open-source operating system from Google.
“Android continues to gain [market share] by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market” said Ramon Llamas, IDC analyst. “It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors’ smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian.”
Android passed Apple’s phone software and Nokia-backed Symbian as the most widely adopted program for smartphones at the end of last year, according to research group Canalys. Because Google’s software is used in devices made by other groups, Nokia, which makes smartphones as well as the Symbian software, is still in the lead in terms of smartphone shipments.
The Finnish company’s unit share widened to 28 per cent from 20 per cent in the quarter, IDC said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
You're still behind the times. I just order online from the phone and skip the call entirely :-D
Smartphone technology is changing a lot faster than desktop PC. I bought a good (near top end) PC back in 2006. It's still good enough to do CAD, image editing, video (NTSC/DVD quality) editing, etc. Why should I replace it?
I buy a new phone every two years. Why? Because the batteries go bad, because they get beat up, because the new phones are much more capable than the old.
You're both off in left field.
I make my own pizza ... it just doesn't get any fresher than that.
I've seen a couple of bills for iphone and droid use.....the startup sound ought to be a "Cha-ching!!"
And what happens when the carrier starts clamping down on bandwidth and imposing surcharges for "over use"??
Think I'll stick with my prepaid dumb phone for a while longer.
Not available from this pizza joint. I don’t think any of my local places offer that, just the national chains.
To every thing there is a season. We make our own at times, too. But when you got home from work and had to go clear the snow from the driveway, it’s time to order out.
I have unlimited data use from VZW.
The big problem anything replacing PCs is that small form factors will always be more expensive to get equal power to large form factors. You can get a PC to do all that you outlined for about half the price of tablet. For anybody that isn’t going to be mobile, which is most of the business market, the PC will continue for a long time just because of that computing power to dollar ratio that the larger form factor allows.
And is the unlimited data available to new Verizon customers?
IIRC, $30 covers most of the “smartphone” capabilities, including the unlimited internet. That’s obviously not the whole bill, but that’s the difference between smartphone and dumb phone.
I was a Bell Atlantic Mobile customer before VZW came along, so I don’t know what they offer to new customers.
It is certainly possible to have movies on a tablet or a smartphone, as long as there is enough disk space. It is also possible to play them because video chipsets today come with hardware decoders just for such a thing. That's why an iPod can play music seemingly forever, and even a DVD playback is done largely by specialized, optimized hardware. The processor in the smartphone does little - it only needs to read the encoded data from the media and shove it into the decoder.
However encoding audio or video requires a lot of processor effort. Encoding of a video is a lengthy process even on a fast desktop PC. As an analogy, it's easy to open a lock if you have a key. But it is much harder to select one lock out of billions that can be opened by a given key. The encoding process is similar to that - it aims to find such a compressed frame that conveys the original content with minimal distortions (artifacts.)
My point was that a smartphone is not even close to a desktop PC in every comparable aspect, primarily in performance. This is because a desktop PC can throw watts at the problem, and a portable unit can't. I'm not even wading into the dearth of quality pointing devices for smartphones... smartphones nowadays want you to control them with your fingers. But an average finger is covering so much of that tiny screen that you can't fit more than a handful of controls onto it. Smartphone is good for smartphoning, but it is ridiculous to compare it to a desktop PC or to infer anything from the results of said comparison.
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