Decade in Review: SmartPhones
To provide a little intellectual stimulation during, hopefully, your holiday, here are some great end of year highlights on the decade from the sharp journalists at The Brew. Some staggering facts:
- The average person touches their phone 2600 times per day.
- About 40% of U.S. adults use their phones primarily to surf the web.
- Nearly 50% of all internet searches are performed with a smartphone.
- Advertising on mobile devices accounts for nearly 2/3 of all U.S. digital ad spending.
- Despite the fact that smartphones are the economic bridge for less developed nations to access commerce, education and information, smartphone growth is slowing by about 4% per year.
dis-rup-shun: It is hard to imagine that the era of the smartphone is in its twilight. Smartphones will be around for the perceivable future, but the white hot center of technology growth and transformation is no longer mobile. Mobile devices and apps have reached saturation. While this marks tougher challenges in selling new phones, it marks a period of more innovative uses of smartphones as companies leverage the mobile platform for new ideas. The result will include innovative things that we will do with smartphones, like the already interesting mobile eye exam from EyeQue, or access to home and office, as already offered by many companies such as VizPin. An innovation I am hoping will be well in place at the end of the next decade is mirroring of our desktop. I would like to be able to sit down at any screen — home, office, airplane, taxi, shared ride/taxi, and have my credentials from my smartphone automatically setup up my desktop, so that my inboxes, my in progress Word or Excel projects would be there, just as I left them a little while ago, so that I can resume my activities. The virtual office concept is one that is in development by Samsung and others, but is not yet in use. I will report on the successful deployment of this concept in the decade in review in 2020, hopefully.