Smartphones to replace PCs

A third of all phones shipped will be smartphones by 2010, according to Symbian, and these devices will displace PCs as the chief method by which users access data and the internet.

At the Symbian Smartphone show in London, the phone software company was making aggressive predictions for the future of its platform as it announced LG Electronics as a new licensee and unveiled a new HSDPA handset from Samsung.

"We're seeing the dawning of a new era, the era of the smartphone, and this will be a shift as profound as that involving the internet and the PC during the nineties. Smartphones will not just be executive toys, but an integral part of people’s lives," said Symbian chief executive Nigel Clifford.

Phones are already swallowing up the functions of other devices such as music players and cameras, a process Clifford predicted would continue, while the devices themselves are shrinking in size by about 10% to 15% each year.

"Even The Economist says a paradigm shift is occurring, and personal computing will increasingly be associated with phones. A smartphone in every pocket should be the vision," Clifford said, pointing out that workers entering employment now had grown up with the internet.

He predicted that services such as email and text messaging will continue to grow, while the extended enterprise will become more prevalent, taking business processes, redesigning them, and deploying them to smartphones to make them more efficient.

Sony Ericsson chief technology officer Mats Lindoff agreed with the Symbian view, saying that the world is moving from a computer on everyone’s desk to a computer in everyone’s pocket.

"A phone today is like a laptop was six or seven years ago, but its battery lasts for two days not two hours," Lindoff said. However, he warned that ba ttery capacity is not increasing at the same speed as Moore’s law, leading to a greater need to save power in handsets.

Two new Symbian-based handsets were unveiled at the show; the LG Joy and the Samsung SGH-i520. Both support 3G networks with HSDPA 'mobile broadband' extensions for fast internet access, and both also run Symbian OS 9.2 with Nokia's Series 60 user interface on a 320x240 display.