A third of all phones shipped will be smartphones by 2010, according to Symbian, and will replace PCs as the way users access data and the internet. In the keynote speech at the Symbian Smartphone show, Symbian CE Nigel Clifford told delegates that the era of the smart phone was dawning, representing a shift "as profound as the Internet and PC were in the 1990s".
Phones are already becoming multimedia devices and stepping on the toes of other devices such as cameras and mp3 players, which Clifford predicts will continue, while the handsets themselves are shrinking by about 10% - 15% each year.
"Desktops PCs are effectively a flatlining commodity," Clifford said, while admitting that laptops were eliciting "perhaps a bit more" excitement.
Smartphones will not just be executive toys, but an integral part of people’s lives," Clifford added.
Clifford's vision is a smartphone in every pocket, and he went on to point 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.
Symbian's head of propositions, John Forsyth, later argued that: "In five years' time you'll wonder why you need a PC at all."
Forsyth went on "phones are beginning to eat into the space of the kind of things that laptops were for...It will be a great relief to be liberated from the laptop," he added, stating laptop battery performance as a key reason.
Sony Ericsson chief technology officer Mats Lindoff agreed, 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. He acknowledged that, while Moore's Law would bring greater processing power for handheld devices, battery power wouldn't keep pace, 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.