Last week Businessinsider.com held a very informative conference in San Francisco called IGNITION WEST: Future of Mobile. The conference covered mobile trends in the past, present, and future predictions and provided great analysis on the future of mobile and apps. To kick off the conference, the BI Intelligence team  including Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Alex Cocotas and Henry Blodget presented a slideshow on the current trends in mobile in which they looked closely at the growth of smartphones and tablets, the platform wars, and how consumers are actually using their devices. It was an eye-opener for anyone who does not see mobile devices as the leader of digital technology and also gives a lot of great, insight into mobile trends we can expect in the next few years.

Jeff Clavier, Mike Maples Jr, Aydin Senkut, and Dave McClure discuss innovation at Ignition West: Future of Mobile conference in California. (photo courtesy of Businessinsider.com)

According to the BI Intelligence team’s deck, in 2011 smartphones and tablets sold much more units than personal computers (including laptops). With the growing technology behind handheld devices, many models of smartphones and tablets are capable of handling anything that a personal computer does.  Given mobile devices’ ease of portability, personal computers may soon become a thing of the past, or at least confined to work spaces only.

The big picture is that smartphones and tablets are the preferred device of consumers on how they intake digital media.  Emails, videos, social media, news, and everything in between is just as easily accessible from a portable device than a laptop, if not more so. Speed and quality is no longer an issue either: Today’s smartphones are more powerful than the laptops and desktops from 3 years ago. All this being said, AP Mobile is happy to be on the forefront of this digital mobile age. You can view BI’s deck on the conference here.