Five Reasons Why #Mobile is Here to Stay

Post originally published on IBM's Mobile Business Insights Blog on 4.14.14 by Piyush Yadav. Tweet out to Piyush @tweetPiyushY or visit IBMMobileFrontier for more interesting discussions on mobile.

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Life and technology are moving at a rapid pace, and today in this throwaway society products get replaced more quickly than ever. Desktops, which were the machines of the future, are now considered a thing of the past. Corded phones got replaced by hands-free phones, which in turn were supplanted by mobile phones.

So are mobile devices also expendable?

I don’t think so, and here are five reasons why:

1. The influx of mobile into business is not limited to smartphones or handheld devices but has spread into many sectors and technologies including robotics, sensors and manufacturing.
2. Mobile devices are the preferred portal to the World Wide Web. Thanks to mobile devices, finding and sharing information is always at your fingertips.
3. Mobile can be a complete package, providing entertainment, education and navigation—all of this supplemented by the ease of use, making mobile a very versatile gadget.
4. Mobile devices are already treasured by so many people because of the ease with which they can be personalized. Users are likely to remain attached to their favorite mobile devices and to expect even more capabilities in them as we move into the future.
5. The Internet of Things (IoT), although comprising mainly machine-to-machine (M2M) devices, still relies on the mobile device as a single handheld console that can act both as a dashboard and as a controller.

One may argue about wearable devices being the successors to mobile, but if you think about it, they are just an extension of the mobile device and applications. They provide limited and specific features just like an app does. Through wearable devices mobile again looks to be a clear winner.

In a nutshell, with social and cloud as key players in the mobile arena, the mobile era is just blooming, and after first-quarter 2014 we can say that the mobile canvas is fresh, and we have just started painting it with colors like #NodeRed and #BlueMix.

Check out these top 20 mobile growth statistics by Tom Vassos, which reasserts my point of view that mobile is here to stay.

The future can, indeed, bring changes in terms of mobile design and features, but the day that mobile gets replaced with something else won’t be anytime soon.

The mobile wave is not going away, so get your programming surfboards and ride the tide.

Can you envision a world without mobile devices?