One could argue that you don’t need a personal computer to function in today’s world. You can do pretty much everything anyone would ever want to do on the internet with just a mobile phone. That was Nokia’s message back in 2007 when they launched the N95 and told people to refer to it as a “multimedia computer” instead of a smartphone. Now back in 2007 that message was a little hard to swallow, even with the release of the iPhone during the summer. Technology being what it is though, things have progressed exponentially over the past five years. One look at the 5.3 inch Samsung Galaxy Note is all you need to see that! The folks at StatCounter have been keeping track of the rise of mobile devices. They’re an analytics company, meaning that websites use their service to keep track of how many people viewing their pages. They say that in January 2009 only 0.7% of the web’s traffic moved through a mobile device (tablets don’t count). In January 2012, just three years later, that number has now reached 8.5%.
Which manufacture is building the devices that are responsible for the most of that traffic? No surprise here, it’s Nokia! Say what you will about their smartphones, it’s their feature phones that put the internet in more people’s hands than any other handset vendor on the planet. More than one out of every three phones that accessed the internet were made by the Finnish handset maker. Close behind Nokia is Apple, with 28.7% of the traffic. Samsung, the third most popular, is just a hair under 15%.
Looking towards the future, that 8.5% figure will likely double by this time next year; low cost smartphones are certainly going to help that. That begs the question, has the personal computer peaked? Last year was the first time more smartphones were sold than PCs, so we’re going to have to say yes.
[Via: Read Write Web, StatCounter]