Smartphones as laptop replacements: can you see the trend?
Is it time to leave the laptop behind? That's the question asked today over at the Wall Street Journal in Nick Wingfield's thoughtful piece. Actually, there's more than just thought and opinion in it. There's some cold, hard facts that illustrate a trend we've been watching develop for several years. In 2004, global smartphone shipments were half that of notebooks. Last year, the tables turned as there were more smartphones than notebooks shipped world-wide and that trend is continuing.
We often talk about the ever-blurring line between feature-phones and smartphones but that same argument can be applied to smartphones and laptops. Of course you can't do some activities on a phone that you can on a notebook computer but the 80-20 rule could be applied. Many people could do 80% of their notebook activities on a smartphone that costs just 20% of a notebook. Using a $199 iPhone as an example, I could easily handle tasks related to e-mail, web-surfing, social networking and even some media playback just as I could on a $1,000 notebook. Is the experience ideal or better on the phone? No, but the landscape is changing to address that. Just look at recent upgrades to Google Gmail for Mobiles or even their new Google Earth application for the iPhone as examples.
Then there's the "tweener" devices: the $300 to $600 netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices that get a cursory mention by Wingfield. They're trying to bridge the gap more from a hardware perspective than a software one. From the netbook perspective, I'm sold that they're a viable solution, but I suspect it's a short-term solution. The market and information access are moving more towards handheld portals, not just shrunken down versions of devices we've had for years.
As far as MIDs go, I'm beginning to see less and less momentum in that space. What sounded good out of Intel (they created the MID name) a year or two ago has been slow to market. When these devices do arrive en masse, will smartphones of the day already be so entrenched and mature that the MID market is gone? Put another way: if you have a smartphone this time next year, will you want to carry a similarly sized device running a full Linux operating system for computing or will the smartphone offer enough at that point?
This doesn't mean there's no longer a need for notebooks today and I'm not advocating that everyone simply abondon their notebook computer and move to a smartphone. However, if you think about what you used to do solely on a laptop and compare that to what you can do today on a smartphone, you can see where we're heading. Are there challenges in terms of Flash, Java, text entry, etc...? Of course there are. But you're thinking in terms of smartphones today... what about tomorrow?
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