The good people at Mobilefuture.org have published some interesting 2010 year end data on smartphones:
- 5 Billion apps downloaded, up from 300 million in 2009
- Twitter grew by 347 percent
- 200 Million mobile Facebook users
- 100 million YouTube videos are played on mobile devices DAILY
You can watch their 3 minute review on YouTube below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mCkbrYKQyI
As staggering as these figures seem, the trend toward smartphone ubiquity shows no signs of slowing. Horace Dediu of Asymco.com published an analysis of Gartner’s market data that showed the smartphone market is growing at a rate of 96%. Mr. Dediu predicts that 2011 is poised to be the year that half the U.S. population will be using smartphones.
In fact, smartphones and tablets are on the verge of overtaking PC computing as the primary way people access the internet. In December of 2010, Steve Lohr of the New York Times cited a recent IDC study, writing:
Mainstream adoption, according to IDC, is when a technology moves well beyond 15 percent or so of the market. In 2011, IDC predicts half of the 2.1 billion people who regularly use the Internet will do so using non-PC devices.
The rapid expansion of highly capable mobile computing devices presents several questions for providers of online services. Do we develop for the mobile web or do we develop stand-alone apps? How do we develop a content strategy for mobile devices? How do we port existing services to mobile platforms? Answers to these questions are enigmatic. One thing seems certain, that mobile computing will be to this decade what the PC was to the 1990’s and the internet to the 2000’s. Users now have access to (relatively) inexpensive handheld computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the machines that started the internet revolution.
How do you see mobile services impacting Libraries? Have you noticed students or faculty using smartphones or tablets more frequently? How do you use mobile devices in your own life? Post a comment and let us know your thoughts!
1 Comment
Smartphones have become common place on hospital wards. They are an ideal point of care reference for drug dosing, accessing up to the moment research for optimizing management, answering patient questions, etc. I look forward to a hybrid with the portability of my smartphone but the expanded capacity of something like and iPad, especially with regards to accessing academic papers and interfacing with printers for applications like printing patient education handouts.