Is this thing on?

Opera has published some stats on phone use with Opera Mini the first quarter this year (based on the URL this seems to be a front page rather than a quarter report 2008/I, so if you read this post later the content may no longer match). To what extent this can be generalised to phone browsing in general is less clear.

The first graph, cumulative users per month, isn't very interesting unless you're into marketing or wonder how well Opera Mini fares, even then it is less useful than the two other graphs for page views and data consumed that tells something about how much it is used as opposed to how often it is installed, and the use grows considerably faster than the number of installs. The consumption table is particularly freaky, what happened in December that almost doubled the traffic (and increased the number of pageview by almost a half)? In November Mini 4.0 was released. That the data consumption increased faster than the number of pages viewed would either mean that people were viewing more advanced (or bloated) pages than they did before, that the data compression is less efficient than 3.0, or both.

The bigger story is that five times as much traffic is handled this March than a year ago, and though the columns are too small to measure precisely that in turn was five times as much as March 2006. So will the current 1 terabyte of data every day turn into 5 terabytes by 2009? By the guesstimate that Opera Mini uses a quarter of Norway's bandwidth, they should be using five quarters of the bandwidth by then...

Of more general interest would be which sites are visited, but I am missing the PC top 10 for the different countries to compare results. The variability from a country to the next is pretty high, possibly higher than desktop. I also wonder how the sites are classified.

If social network sites are relatively more commonly accessed on a phone than on a PC, it would fit my tenet that a phone is a more social device than a PC. A high number of searches wouldn't be surprising either, you get the answer where you are, and now you have a fair chance of getting the answer before you forget the question too.

Since the late 1980s I have been among those predicting the end of the Personal Computer, and that end is now in sight. The PC is going the way of the typewriter, but not overnight. It took the PC about 15 years to completely replace the typewriter, and we can expect a similar interval before it finally disappear, possibly ending up among the same hobbyists where it started.

This transformation is less fundamental than the replacement of the typewriter was. It is like the T-Ford replacing the horse carriage, and modern cars replacing the T-Ford. Apple may score points for experimenting with the "Any color you like as long as it is beige" formula, but the Mac is still a T-Ford.

The PCs were called microcomputers before IBM coined the name Personal Computer, and overall microcomputers is a more apt name, they have just become a lot more micro lately. For IBM, that some decades earlier had estimated the world demand of computers to 5, the idea that each person should have his own computer was a radical one at the time. It just wasn't radical enough. I don't want to be constrained to one PC. I use several computers daily, a couple stationary, others are mobile, most are embedded. I can visit a friend or maybe an Internet cafe and have access to much the same information there as I would have at home.

The truly radical idea was the network, the Ethernet and the Internet (ARPAnet in those days). It was immediately obvious how brilliant networking was, but it was also exorbitantly expensive. An Ethernet connection cost about the same as a PC, and as you needed to pay for at least two computers plus the connection, a computer network was only something universities and some companies could afford. But the ones that did were a part of a global network (for a rather small part of the globe). The cost rapidly fell, and has been falling ever since. This has been the PC's undoing.

The PC is a package created by cost and manufacturing concerns, again much like the T-Ford. To a much lesser extent has it been formed by user needs. Devices that have been formed by user needs have not been able to communicate with other devices. As the rigid manufacturing regimes are falling, communication gets easier, and the cost is gone, the computers become a component of the product instead of the product itself. This will diversify computers as well as simplify them, with the big beige house altar gone.

The PC computers will change skin before retirement. Cost and manufacturing has led to mobile PCs, the black clamshelled boxes called everything from portable to notebook, being competitive with stationary PCs, and soon they will be cheaper. Just as phones are entering a clamshell phase, the notebook may leave it. The heaviest component in a notebook is the battery, the biggest is the screen. The other components, including keyboard, storage, and processor can be neatly folded up more tightly than today. Dual-screen notebooks, battery booster packs (with bundled media player?), notebook set-top boxes, foldable screens, or simply a phone with an attached keyboard and/or screen bundle. With the software divested from the hardware, and data divested from the software, such components could be of use for other devices too.

While the even the stationary PCs may become tossable, most won't move much during their lifetime. Smaller computers means that it is as natural to plug them into other devices as it is to plug devices into them. Gradually they will lose their elevated personal assistant status. It won't matter if you have previously a task on one device or another, the next time you do that task you use the device that is most handy. With the exclusivity gone, the Personal in front of the Computer, the computer will retreat to the background to do its tasks to let the device perform its role.