Mobile the way to go: especially in the developing world

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.

It says the mobile platforms (phones, mini PCs and the radio networks to connect them) will be the "single most powerful way to reach and deliver public and private services to hundreds of millions of people in remote and rural areas across the developing world."

"Internet users in developing countries increased tenfold from 2000 to 2007, and there are now over four billion mobile phone subscribers in developing countries," says Mohsen Khalil, World Bank Group Director for Global Information and Communication Technologies.

It's a powerful argument. Those billions of mobile phone users dwarf the world's personal computer owners and as mobile broadband spreads and phones get more capable and more affordable, it's arguably the smartphone operating systems that will populate many of the access devices of the next wave of Internet users.

Global sales figures tell part of the story. The global PC market is having a hard time, with an 8.1 per cent drop in shipments in the first quarter, down from 72.3 million units to 66.5 million units. Ouch! But still big numbers.

That is until we look at mobile phones. That segment suffered an even greater 20 per cent unit sales decline from Q4 2008, but the world's vendors and operators still shipped 255.6 million handsets, a large and growing proportion of those in developing and emerging world.

Huge numbers and a gigantic installed base. And that's probably where a big tranche of the next generation of smartbook/netbook buyers are coming from.