Mobility Techzone Week in Review

Can anyone doubt that the PC is no longer the device front and center on the minds of most people when they look to buy their next technology toys? Haven’t PCs really become more like stoves or refrigerators? OK, well, maybe a large-screen TV is more appropriate. The point is that no one – even very wealthy people – spends a lot of time acquiring new refrigerators, stoves or even TVs once they are done renovating. If they aren’t renovating they aren’t even thinking about those items. They are in place, they work and well, there are much more fun things to acquire. Alas, PCs on the consumer end of things have finally reached this stage of existence. Some such as IDC call it decline – we ourselves prefer to think PCs have achieved ecosystem equilibrium.

There is no doubt either that what has caused PCs to enter this state of ecosystem equilibrium is the tablet. Let’s face it, no one thinks about upgrading PCs anymore. Rather, consumers are now either engaged in acquiring their first tablets or have already reached the point of wanting to upgrade their existing tablets. As these latter folks upgrade, their existing tablets get handed down. Tablets are what we want. This week ABI Research put out a research report that more or less says the same thing – but puts a dollar figure on our desires – we’re looking at tablet driven sales of a whopping $64 billion in 2013, representing roughly 150 million of the mobile devices. That is huge.

We dearly wish we could say the same for BlackBerry Z10s. Alas, the storyline here is that US sales are not going very well, and today we have news that when users do buy the devices a substantial number of them end up bringing them back and getting rid of them. It’s sad news, and even though we give BlackBerry credit for offering up evidence to discredit the report, one has to believe there are likely more devices being returned than would be the case for well-received new gadgets. BlackBerry claims returns are better than industry norms. We’ll know for certain when BlackBerry next reports earnings in about three months. We’re still rooting for BlackBerry to succeed in any case.

Here is an interesting and perhaps hard-to-fathom number. Juniper research has run a calculation and has concluded that by 2017 the world will have seen (or will have been subjected to, depending on your point of view), an astounding 42 quadrillion tweets. We’re going to go out on a limb and suggest that 41.8973 quadrillion of them will not have been worth the electrons used to generate them.

It turns out that cloud computing is not only very useful to both businesses and consumers, but it turns out that cloud computing is also very useful to the mobile telecommunications industry - in fact, 56 percent of mobile telecom companies said the cloud helped them increase profits, and over half (55 percent) said the resulting increase in profits was from 10 to 50 percent by using the cloud. The survey of 1,300 U.S. and U.K. companies across industries also found that the majority of mobile telecom companies said the cloud reduced their IT costs, with 69 percent saying the reduction was in the 10 to 50 percent range.

Video also happens to be great for the mobile telco space. Verizon Wireless, for example, says that video traffic now accounts for more than half of all Verizon Wireless mobile data traffic. Over the course of the next several years, that proportion is expected to reach clear to about 66 percent of traffic. That adds up to a lot of video revenue. We’re quite sure Verizon Wireless is happy with these statistics.

The other day we read a comment from some person who was responding to yet another media article focused on comparing iPhones and Galaxy devices. This person provided a rather snarky comment that “old people” used iPhones and young people loved their Android devices. Well, perhaps this snarky person is also uninformed. A newly released study has uncovered a very interesting insight: 48 percent of teenagers in the United States use an iPhone and 62 percent plan to buy one as their next phone. So much for uninformed and snarky people who love their Android devices!

T-Mobile, meanwhile, will be backing up its already impressive iPhone 5 pricing scheme with a special trade-in offer to help encourage users to step in and get their hands on the iPhone 5. No doubt T-Mobile is glad to hear about teens and their desires regarding iPhones. We do advise anyone heading over to T-Mobile to get in on the deal to first carefully compare how all costs – including the cost of wireless service and other features will pan out with your current carrier. By all means go over to T-Mobile, but go there fully informed. The dollars you may save are entirely your own.