Asia will lead the future in mobile revolution, including innovation

All of the newest ideas in futrue will land on the mobile platform, and Asia will lead the future in mobile revolution, including innovation, according to Mr Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google. Nearly five per cent of doctors in India already consider phones essential to their work, he said referring to mobile revolution that is taking place.

“Mobile is on fire. The connected technologies such as phones and tablets are the new story,” he said in his keynote address at Google's Mobile Revolution press meet. Google brought this correspondent to Tokyo for this event.

While mobile phones, especially smart phones, are still too expensive for average citizen the prices of these phones are coming down - from $500 to $200 and may be as cheap as $50.

Hardware price is also coming down, which coupled with Opensource software is helping the mobile revolution that will be fundamentally based on Android - Google's mobile platform - he said.

A lot of applications are still in feature phones. But that's changing quickly. The personal computer is being overthrown. Last year's mobile data traffic was three times the size of the entire Internet in 2000 (237 petabytes vs 75 petabytes a month).

Smartphone sales will surpass personal computers by 2012, he said.

Asia leads the boom

Mr Schmidt said the number of mobile phones in Asia will reach three billion, which is a phenomenal number.

With debt challenges in West, the future is in Asia. Young people will move here. Around 10 million subscribers are added a month in India and China. Even in markets with lower penetration rates such as Indonesia and the Philippines, ‘we expect to see amazing growth,' he said.

Moore's Law

Quoting Moore's Law - it says the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years - Mr Schmidt said the next generation network will be as fast as 50 Mbps, and one gigabit will be Internet standard by 2020.

Today, the average connection speed for smart phones is over 60 per cent faster than 18 months back. Devices are becoming faster and available at cheaper rates.

Much of work to bring innovative products and applications are being done by Asian engineers who are using modern physics and doing amazing things, he said.

Android

“I think Android is pretty much the right answer for everything. It is in many ways the perfect expression of our open source over the last years. You can modify it as you see fit,” he said.

More than 5,50,000 daily Android activations are happening across the world; there are 410 devices only two years after launching; 135 million devices. People are building these extremely powerful devices. (During first quarter of 2011 over 36 million Android smartphones were sold globally, says Gartner).

Fukushima -- Google's reach

Google built ‘person finder' whereby people in America could find their family in Fukushima. This is why technology matters.

In some sense, ‘Internet is transforming the way we think about information. In the darkest hours, Web can shine light,' he said.

In disasters, or prosperity or openness in less democratic societies, the global community and solidarity has deeper implication for how society will work. This is powerful. Web is strengthening human relationships, he said.

People feel like their phones are an extension of their arms. It is a supercomputer in one's hands. It changing one's habits.

In a study with nearly 2000, nearly 17 per cent of age 2-3 and 19 per cent of 3-5 year old knew how to access smart phone applications. However, only nine per cent at this age can tie shoes. First thing, young people do is learn how interact with their phone, said Mr Daniel Alegre, President Google Asia Pacific.

COMMENT NOW