We have been talking about an alternative path to the Internet for the BOP in emerging economies. We said this path would be through the mobile phone and talked about how it was converging with the conventional computer, through smartphone and netbooks that would percolate down to the BOP through second-hand markets. But now people beginning to talk about this happening to TOP markets in rich countries as well. Below is Item 7 in a list entitled the ten businesses the smartphone has destroyed:
There are plenty of studies that insist that smartphones will begin to replace the PC as the common vehicle for accessing the Internet. Analyst firm Informa Telecoms & Media projects that smartphone traffic will increase 700% over the next five years. IT research firm Gartner predicts that smartphone sales will outpace PC sales by 2012, if not earlier. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company’s mobile business has doubled over the last year, has expressed this sentiment as well. As smartphones continue to feature more memory, storage capability and stronger processing power, consumers will increasingly rely on them for Internet use instead of their clunky PCs.
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