The future is mobile

In business, mobile phones used to be good for one thing - keeping in touch with people by phone when you were on the road or working at a location other than the office. You may or may not remember car phones - I used to have one when I worked for Nike and drove 90,000 miles a year. It was attached to the car and clunky as hell, but felt very cool at the time.

Then phones became truly mobile and we started being able to send and receive email, texts, and organise our diaries. Then came colour displays, phones that were also cameras, and... well you know the rest.

Although mobile phones are everywhere (according to Ofcom statistics, 89% of the UK population now has a mobile phone), I wonder if we still realise the true significance of this piece of kit and where mobile is leading us. It's a quiet revolution easily as transformational as the internet itself.

Smartphone penetration may not yet have reached critical mass in the UK, (although a June 2010 AOP Digital Landscape Report found that smartphone usage is up 70% and growing fast in the UK). Some say that smartphones are the key to the growth of ecommerce. Geo-social services may still be fragmented, unreliable and seen as somewhat niche, but personally I see this having a bright future. Meanwhile we are still debating whether mobile internet or apps will be the key drivers of all this. And whether connectivity can keep up with the speed of developments in handsets, I don't know.

But I am sure that in not that many years to come, more of us will use mobile devices in preference to computers, however thin or lightweight they may be. The desktop computer will be relegated to the museum and we will marvel at the weight and clunkiness of the iPad much as today's digital natives may wonder how public phone boxes ever served a useful purpose.

When 'social' ceases to be an eclectic add-on to a marketing strategy but instead a taken-for-granted, essential part of business culture, mobile will be there at the forefront.

Do you agree?