2012 is the Year of Mobile Explosion (Mobile in Focus #1)

Last year, and for the first time ever, shipments of smartphones overtook shipments of PCs.  As smartphones become more powerful and mimic most of the PCs processing capabilities, it should be an important fact.  We are slowly migrating from a PC-centric world to a mobile world, embedded with "on-the-go" mobile broadband connections.  It is relevant because it is the new place where the fight for high-tech dominance is taking place, and also because attention is so mucho more difficult to capture than it was 10 years ago in the PC era.

Mobile devices (smartphones, tablets and e-readers) hold roughly 70% of the shipment volume, according to market information from Gartner and IDC.  If we consider that in 2005 we did not even know the term smartphone, it is truly a magnificent feat.  As feature phones disappear and are replaced by smartphones, a world of new services becomes available to the user (via the apps sellers), a domain largely dominated by Apple and its iOS ecosystem with over 600 million active devices.  Android, in spite of representing a large majority of these devices, has followed - as we will see in an upcoming Mobile in Focus post- a fragmented approach which might help it become the market leader in units but not in preference and overall quality.

So just how well are the big guys doing here? In a world dominated by mobile devices, the high-tech giants must strive to conquer this new landscape.  Apple, in this case, sells the most successful and desired smartphone; Google provides the most widely used mobile Operating System (although it is not competing as a manufacturer, but rather as a licensor of the OS), Amazon is quickly adapting its applications to better suit the mobile world and has entered the hardware fight with its Kindle Fire tablet (based on Android OS), and Facebook is pushing to convert as soon as possible as many as possible of its users into mobile users of tools such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram, and it is rumored to be launching a branded phone soon ... the best is yet to come!