Sources: ABI Research, Gartner, IDC, Forrester (2009 – 2010) Morgan Stanley has forecast that Internet access on mobile devices, on a global basis, will exceed PC access by 2014. That’s already true in some developing countries, but it’s aggressive for the West and developed world. Nonetheless the day will come in the next several years.PC vs. Mobile: How Big a Gap?
Tue, 07/06/2010 – 06:40 by One of the opening slides at any and every mobile conference used to be one showing how many PCs there were compared with the number of mobile devices in the world. I grew very tired of that slide because the yawning gap between hardware categories seemed increasingly obvious: there are a lot of mobile handsets in the world. Enough already!
However, a newish estimate from ABI Research says that there will be five (5) billion mobile subscriptions across the globe by the end of the year. This isn’t devices per se, it’s accounts presumably. But the figure would generally correspond with devices. By contrast, depending on which firm you consult, there are roughly 1.2 to 1.4 billion PCs in use around the world. That means there are or will be almost 5X the number of mobile devices/handsets as PCs by the end of the year.
I was struck by the five billion number so I’m reproducing the slide, despite railing against it in the past: Sources: ABI Research, Gartner, IDC, Forrester (2009 – 2010) Morgan Stanley has forecast that Internet access on mobile devices, on a global basis, will exceed PC access by 2014. That’s already true in some developing countries, but it’s aggressive for the West and developed world. Nonetheless the day will come in the next several years.
Sources: ABI Research, Gartner, IDC, Forrester (2009 – 2010) Morgan Stanley has forecast that Internet access on mobile devices, on a global basis, will exceed PC access by 2014. That’s already true in some developing countries, but it’s aggressive for the West and developed world. Nonetheless the day will come in the next several years.