rfmcdonald | [LINK] "In Less Than Two Years, a Smartphone Could Be Your Only Computer" (Reply)

I'm as dubious as many of the commenters about the thesis of Christina Bonnington's Wired article, if only because the power of a smartphone does not translate necessarily to usability. Then again, since I use desktops and tablets extensively for my own purposes, I would be dubious, wouldn't I?

With each passing season, another wave of mobile devices is released that’s more capable and more powerful than the generation preceding it. We’re at the point where anyone armed with a current model smartphone or tablet is able to handle almost all of their at-home—and even at-work—tasks without needing anything else. We’re living proof: for the last two years, WIRED has been able to cover events like CES almost exclusively using our smartphones.

Only a few years ago, this wasn’t the case. In 2011, the Motorola Atrix paired with a laptop dock for clunky, limited smartphone-based computer experience. It was a great idea, conceptually, but ahead of its time. The smartphones of 2011 and 2012 weren’t quite powerful enough to fulfill all of our computing demands.

But thanks to increased processing power, better battery life, vastly improved networking speeds, and larger screen sizes on mobile devices, the shift away from the desktop is accelerating.

“Will we always need a desktop? No, not all of us will,” says consumer trends industry expert and Kantar Worldwide’s chief researcher, Carolina Milanesi. “Some of us already don’t.”

Chipmaker ARM believes that with its new chips announced last week—a new Cortex-A72 processor and Mali-T880 GPU—we’ll be able to count on our smartphones to do all the tasks we currently need a computer to do. The company is so confident of this, it’s projecting a date when we can go phone-only: 2016. That leaves us roughly 23 months to make it happen. But most of us are already phone-first today, and given the current speed at which the industry is moving, we’ll be rounding that bend very soon.