Around the world, mobile Internet traffic is rapidly gaining on desktop traffic, so much so that it's already surpassed the latter in some parts of the world by a huge margin. This is ultimately an advantage for consumers due to the abundance of new products that'll come into fruition— something that we're already starting to see happen.
According to a report from Stanford University and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Mary Meeker, three percent of all Internet traffic now comes from from a mobile device, representing a four percent increase from just two years ago. In India, meanwhile, mobile Internet traffic has reached a whopping 60 percent, surpassing all desktop Internet traffic. And naturally, monetization of the mobile sector is growing at an equally impressive rate with an annual growth rate of 129% during the past four years.
Sales of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are expected to gradually increase over the next three years, moving more than 1.7 billion units in 2015. Meanwhile, sales of PCs and laptops are expected to remain relatively anemic with less than 400 million units sold. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of adults in the U.S. own a tablet or e-reader, an impressive adoption rate considering that less than three years ago only two percent owned one of these gadgets.
So, what does all of this mean for consumers like you? Well, it's ultimately a good thing. For one, companies will undoubtedly put user satisfaction first, so with their products and services now exposed to an audience that's more mobile savvy, the mobile user experience should improve dramatically in the coming years. Just a few years back, the user experience on a normal handset with an Internet browser was completely abysmal. Nothing was optimized as website owners didn't have a large audience in the mobile market. Now things are completely different, and we can expect app usability and accessibility to continue to receive a considerable amount of attention.
We can also expect an abundance of more smartphones and tablets to be released, along with renewed emphasis on "phablets." Vendors have seen the astronomical success of both smartphones and tablets, so they've been working on a hybrid between the two. Take Samsung's Galaxy Note II, which has a screen size of 5.5 and boasts a powerful 1.6 GHz quad-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a maximum of 128 GB storage, which is significantly more hardware than you'll find in most netbooks.
The transition away from from traditional PCs and laptops is already well underway, and while new products in the that market are failing to capture the attention of consumers (remember the brief ultrabook trend?), the mobile space has catapulted smartphones and tablets to the forefront of tech and we think that'll be the case long into the future.
SlideShare, via memeburn
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