As in January 2012, Apple and Samsung combined have taken about half of the smart phone market globally with Nokia at #3 position.  This is a piece of news update from Reuters and several other reports on the web.  Smart phone is very popular for many reasons.  It has many functions such as checking emails, websites, and obviously making or receiving phone calls.  It is a personal organizer with a calendar and reminder functions.  It has a high definition camera.  It has GPS for location information.  It has more and more functions and applications as the clock ticks each minute thanks to online shops like Apple store and Android store. Together with tablets which have a bigger size but some without voice phone functions, they constitute a new generation of client devices and we call this time the 3rd PC era. What are the 2nd and 1st PC eras respectively?  Are they history?  No, definitely not.

Laptop and notebook would be the 2nd PC era as they were the hottest computing devices in the first 10 years of this millennium.  Like tablets, they are small and portable.  Unlike tablets and smart phones, they did not have a large range or variety of functions because Internet technologies were not as well developed at that time. They were mainly computing devices with email and website communication facilities.  They were not very user friendly and did not take finger movements as commands.  They took a long time to boot up and the battery ran out very soon.  Despite of all these short-comings, they outsold desktops during the period.

At the moment (year 2012), old guard vendors have decided to recover their client device market by improving laptops and notebooks to a new variety called Ultrabooks.  Ultrabooks are slim, light, would last long on battery, would boot fast, and would take finger movement commands.  That is, they will have most of the beauties of tablets and smart phones.  In addition, they will be suitable for content creation and not just for information consumption.

Desktops started the PC era in about 1985.  They have improved a lot in performance, reliability and pricing over the last 25 years. However, they are no longer the darling of consumers as they are not trendy among many practical reasons. They are still the darling of businesses and professionals for being the workhorse in the work place.  An above average company in terms of use of computers would achieve 100% of productivity gain over a period of 7.2 years.  A smart company would not only gain in productivity and would become fiercely more competive as many banks and airlines have demonstrated. 

All 3 types of devices co-exist in 2012 because they serve different needs.  In very simple terms, desktops are best for content creation whereas tablets are best for information consumption.