on yjiang4
Many
tech folk think
we’ve entered
what Steven Jobs liked to call “a post-PC era”. This doesn’t mean that
PCs are
about to disappear. Shipments of them will keep growing, especially
in emerging markets hungry for / computing power. But smartphones and tablet
computers are putting PCs in the shade. This year combined shipments of / two
devices are likely to outstrip those of PCs for the first time, and they will
keep growing strongly. In many rich countries, smartphones now /
outnumber more basic feature phones. And in emerging markets, such as China and
India, they are expected to catch up with feature phones, too.
Downloadable
software applications
or apps have helped to make these tablets and smartphones so popular. Almost 18 billion apps will be
downloaded this year and that number will soar as more mobile devices are sold.
Many of these apps are free, but a few are used regularly. One study found that the ten
most popular Android apps accounted for 43% of all / usage, and the top 50% for almost two thirds of
it.
As
mobile gadgets have become more powerful, they’re being used more at
work. In 2010, 31% of devices used by information workers to access things such as
spreadsheets and customer databases with their own, this year that number leapt to
41%, partly because of the impact of tablet computers. TechTypes refer
to this as “the consumerization of IT”.
Although
the number of PCs
in use
has risen
over time, all sorts of mobile, web connected devices are now taking off. Some ten
billion of these could be in circulation by the end of the decade. This will produce an
explosion of mobile data. By 2015, some 6.3 exabytes of the stuff will be
zipping around each month, which is the equivalent of 63 billion copies of
the Economist. Fortunately, much of this mobile data will be in the form of
videos like the one you're watching now. It promises to be an eye-opening new era in the world
of personal technology.
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