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Smartphones and tablets will spell the end of the PC era in the next 18 months
According to a forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC), 2011 will be the year of the tablets and smartphones. Smartphone sales are expected to rise 22% to 330 million sold next year as more people make the transition away from feature phones. Tablets will also hit 42 million sales in 2011- with the market being flooded by Apple’s competitors looking to outsell the iPad. But Apple will remain in the lead whereas the low-cost tablets could do well in emerging markets. The report ends with a remarkable statement- “The PC-centric era is over.” The IDC predicts that within the next 18 months, non-PC devices running software will outsell PCs. There’s no telling if the report will come true or not, but if it does happen, our lives will be pretty different in the near future. Can you imagine living a life without desktop computers? Sounds pretty far-fetched to me but then again, anything could happen in 18 months. What are your thoughts on these predictions?
The title says it all, and that was pretty quick. It was only yesterday when the iOS 5 was announced and the beta was made available to developers but yet wasting little to no time, hackers MuscleNerd and Co have managed to jailbreak iOS 5 on the iPod touch fourth generation. The exploit they used was the limera1n jailbreak which means that iOS 5 presented the hackers with little surprises when it came to closing the loop holes that would make the limera1n exploit work.
Naturally the iOS 5 is currently in beta which means there are probably still plenty of holes to be exploited and we can only assume that in the final release iOS 5 would-be hackers will have a harder time trying to jailbreak it. However this is good news for those on jailbroken devices who were worried that they might be in for a rather long wait when it comes to getting the jailbroken version if iOS 5 on their devices.
Anyone who has owned an iOS device knows that upon out of the box, the first thing they see is their device asking them to tether it to their computer in order to set up synch with iTunes. Not necessarily a bad thing but what if the person’s computer was not well equipped enough to run iTunes properly or what if they didn’t know what all these synching meant?
Tabbed browsing isn’t new. In fact there are browser apps already available for iOS that features tabbed browsing, but either way we are happy that Apple has decided to sit up and take notice of what users want in their browsers and finally implemented tabbed browsing in their native iOS browser app, Safari.