In what I would say is a very smart and practical move, it looks like Nokia is considering entering the laptop industry. Why does this move make sense? Because as Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasuvo says "we don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging."
From that same interview with Finnish media, he adds that "hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone."
Similarly, Taiwanese manufacturer Acer, traditionally known for making computers, has unveiled its new line of mobile phones. Unsurprisingly, the phones are Wi-Fi enabled smart phones that will be running a Windows operating system.
Echoing the Nokia CEO's remarks, Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci said that "for a large part of the world population the first opportunity to connect to the Internet will be via mobile computing, either through smartphones or netbooks."
In a few years from now, I think that you will be hard pressed to make a distinction between a personal computer and a mobile phone, as they will essentially be the same device.
A few years ago (even a year ago), people were rushing to develop websites specifically for mobile phones. These plans seem to have fallen by the wayside as now mobile phones are capable of handling rich content just as easily as computer-based web browsers.
Similarly, it should come as no surprise that mobile banking is expected to explode over the next few years. As TMC.net reports, mobile phones are expected to be used for more than $860 billion worth of transactions by 2013, creating revenues of over $10 billion for banks and other service providers. I couldn't find any information about the growth of the online banking industry over the next few years, but I imagine that it was pretty similar to what is expected for the mobile banking industry.
(thanks to Textually for pointing some of these stories out!)
-Parker