Whitewater world - the insane numbers of iOS and Android

Tim Bray works for Google, so he's not a great source on the state of Android phones. (He's a smart critic of the iPhone though.)

On the general mobile market though, he's very credible ....

ongoing by Tim Bray - The Great Game

... The Numbers Are Really Big · Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen...

Robotics will be huge over the next decade, but today this is where the revolution is. The numbers are insane. Within seven years most of the world's population between the ages of 20 and 60 will have a net connected high powered computing device in their household. [1]

This is not business as normal. This is the whitewater world. The Great Disruptors of technological innovation and the rise of China and India aren't going away.

Expect severe turbulence.

[1] Moore's Law. Within 3 years it's so cheap to put an app phone together that there's not much cost advantage to build a dumb phone. Then it's all about software, and that price will fall to zero.