Only two years ago three-quarters of consumers nominated desktops and laptop computers as the most important device they needed to connect to the internet.
Today those old clunkers can’t even scrape together a majority. Instead smartphones top the poll and with new devices coming online all the time, the age of the brick has passed forever.
The research by Ofcom Technology asked, “Which is the most important device you use to connect to the internet at home or elsewhere?”
Smartphones topped the list at 33 per cent of respondents, more than double the number two years ago. And that figure doesn’t include tablets which also grew strongly from eight per cent to 19 per cent.
As blogger daringfireball (from where we sourced the reference noted) said, “Assuming the polling is valid, this suggests we’ve already passed the inflection point where most people consider their mobile devices (phone and tablet) central to their use of the internet.”
The change brought by mobility is only likely to accelerate as not only are the devices becoming more central to an individual consumers experience of the world but there is still a huge untapped population of global users anchored to older feature phones (or who have no phones at all).
There is also an interesting goat in the snake of the Ofcom research.
Asked what device they would most miss, the younger generation skews very heavily to mobility, while TV gets stronger the older the cohort. If you think the PC guys are doing it tough, the chart above is very, very bad news for the television media industry.
