Smartphones Are Moving Closer To Replacing PCs

If Mae West were alive today, the blond bombshell might be asking her dates, "Is that a PC in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" With each new generation of smartphones, that question is getting harder to answer.

At the same time that mobile phones like Apple's iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1, and now the BlackBerry Bold are getting smarter and able to perform more tasks, the amount of work that can be done on the Web -- or in the cloud -- is also growing rapidly. It's not surprising, then, that a recent poll by IBM found that more than half of all respondents would be willing to trade their PC for a smartphone to access the Internet.

Are Mobile Phones Netbooks?

Industry analysts have been speculating recently that the increase in cloud computing will give rise to a new category of devices called netbooks. These devices would essentially be thin clients with limited processing power and would do most of their work on the Web, utilizing either mobile or wired broadband. Smartphones, however, may be making the development of netbooks moot.

"The usage that iPhones have already had clearly validates the idea that smartphones will expand into PC territory," said Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. "Indeed, the G1 is not being positioned as a phone, but rather a handheld Internet device."

Apple CEO Steve Jobs echoed that view in a recent conference call to announce Apple's strong fourth-quarter sales.

"You know, one of our entrants into that category [netbooks], if you will, is the iPhone," Jobs said, "for browsing the Internet and doing e-mail and all the other things that a netbook lets you do. And being connected via the cellular network wherever you are, an iPhone is a pretty good solution for that, and it fits...