Will Google Glass Disrupt The Smartphone Wars?

Is the future of mobile becoming a little clearer? Is it in fact settling down into a pattern that will persist over the next few years, one in which Apple and Samsung share the spoils while the rest try, vainly, to wrest from them that elusive commodity called profit? The writing is on the wall in smartphones and with an increasingly stable outlook, Google Glass looks like the only disruption in town. What we are really looking towards is a new way of presenting and absorbing information. Google Glass looks like the nearest we have to a new paradigm, but in fact my guess is it is too static. Information needs to be as pervasive as our lifestyle needs. It won’t be stuck to our heads. But it might be in our ears, on our wrists, on the objects we observe or all three together, and more. 

• Global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent in 2012
• 2012 mobile data traffic was nearly 12 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000
• Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2012
• Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012
• In 2012, a fourth-generation (4G) connection generated 19 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection
• The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate 16 percent of mobile data traffic, down from 52 percent at the beginning of 2010
• Average smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012
• Smartphones represented only 18 percent of total global handsets in use in 2012, but represented 92 percent of total global handset traffic

■ Globally, 33 percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in 2012.
■ Android data use is now higher than iPhone data use.
■ In 2012, the number of mobile-connected tablets increased 2.5-fold to 36 million, and each tablet generated 2.4 times more traffic than the average smartphone.