There can be only one. And it’s going to be a smartphone.

Mobile devices.

Large format smartphones set to take over the computing world.

In less than 24hrs, Apple pounded the final nail into the coffin of small smartphone. They took orders for 4 million phones, and set to shatter every smart device sales record with an estimated 10 million devices sold by launch day.

We’ll look back in 5 years and wonder how we coped with small screens and sub-one-day battery life. Or how we humped around gorilla-arm inducing laptops. Desktops? They’ll look like a throwback to the last century.

The writing was on the wall

Since 2008, smartphones have had the power, storage, integration and flexibility to replace all personal computing devices. The only reason to use larger devices has been for the interface; the screen and the keyboard.

Enter a new breed of interfaces. Voice, portable keyboards, watches, accelerometers, glasses. We’ll see the demise of the QWERTY keyboard’s dominance in the next 3 years.

Fixed screens? They’re under pressure from screen sharing/mirroring, glasses, watches, notification devices, vibration interfaces and a plethora of wireless displays.

Before this decade is out there will be few reasons for using a laptop, desktop … or even a tablet.

We will end up with fewer personal computing devices, and rely more on the wireless world of the internet of things. And if everyone has just the one it’s the sane as wearable computing.

This single device becomes everything to us; it’s your information source, your central processor, how you pay for stuff, your personal and health guardian.

Time to start thinking differently. Think big phones and not much else. The world of digital services is going to change, and much quicker than you might imagine.