The iPad or generally the “tablet” was supposed to be the big thing in this post-PC era. Even though it was a miss, there’s no denying of the fact that this is indeed a post-PC era (as described by Steve Jobs). The tablets couldn’t do it but the smartphone did and mobile devices (tablets included) have reached another big milestone, the internet usage on mobile devices has surpassed the internet usage on traditional desktops. It’s a huge moment in the history of internet.
The result was a no surprise, the PC has been slumping for a long time now. The sales have been going down every year and traditional PC manufacturers experiments failing to tap the consumers. With the latest in the trend being Apple itself, the company which defined the post-PC era. If we take a look at the Windows side, almost all the manufactures are trying to create laptop-tablet hybrids. One that did stand out from the herd (excluding Apple) was Lenovo’s Yoga Book which eliminated the physical keyboard in favour of a touch based counterpart but still retaining the traditional style of laptops.
Getting into more details, it was reported by StatCounter, the internet monitoring firm that mobile devices and tablets together accounted for 51.2 percent of the internet traffic whereas the desktops accounted for 48.7 percent. The firm also mentioned that mobile internet usage is much higher in emerging markets whereas in more mature markets, the desktop still rules the roost.
In another report by comScore in April last year, it was found that the number of users who connect through mobile internet has overtaken the number of users who connect only via the desktop. Also Google revealed last May that more searches are done through mobile devices as compared to desktops.
The web has been turning mobile-first in the past years but looks like we’re going to be seeing every service tuned exclusively for mobile devices very soon than we anticipated.