An assumption, often held on the PC side of the ICT market, writes Ian Scales, is that the mobile phone's migration to larger formats involves the 'niche' evolving until it looks like the PC - bloated operating system and all.
So with this view, large-format variants of the smartphone (MID, smartbook etc) won't be able to compete in the 'netbook' market because they can't support Windows.
"Rubbish," say the smartphone supporters: the pertinent question is whether Windows can actually compete in the smartbook market against smartphone-derived, low-powered, easy-to-use competitors.
The device that will evolve between the netbook and the smartphone, they say, will be a mobile phone derivative based on a Unix variant like Apple's OSX, LiMo or Android, and that's because this market will be mostly formed by mobile users wanting a bigger format to run their mobile apps on. The big growth will be in "big phones" not "small PCs".
The 'big phone' side of the argument got a boost recently with the publication of the World Bank report on the importance of 'mobile' now in the global economy.
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