Travelling as much as I do, I have noticed quite a big change over the last decade in the range of gadgets carried by travellers. It used to be the case that you saw most business travellers with their Nokia 6210 mobile phones and some actually had laptops ranging from the hulking huge to the micro, but the ordinary ‘civilan’ at best would have a mobile and possibly a portable cd player or tape player.
Today, pretty much 90% of travellers (including holiday makers) take at least one laptop with them, ranging from the hip Apple to the much more regular netbooks. I also have to say it to the ‘netbooks are dead’ fraternity, the MAJORITY of computers I see particularly amongst the holiday maker is the Netbook – an Acer or an Asus. Everyone has a mobile, and certainly near 50% have a smartphone of some sort (although including any Nokia in this classification is almost heresy). Most smartphones are of the Blackberry variety (the business man) but with a rapidly growing number of Apple iPhone and Android devices.
Over the last six months though I have seen a change, in that I am regularly seeing the incidence of tablets and eReaders, with tablets occuring more regularly than the latter. As a rule the eReader of choice is definitely the Amazon Kindle, with a few Sony eReaders occurring. Today I have seen 3 Kindles amongst those waiting for my flight.
Now with the tablets however, I see the iPad primarily, but this week I have seen Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch devices and (a new one for me) the Blackberry Playbook. Today I saw 4 iPads, 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch, and 1 Playbook amongst my fellow travellers. The occurence of music players is now almost nil, apart from Apple iPod Touches, with almost everyone you see going through their smartphones. Goodbye MP3 player, we knew you for such a short time.
I wonder what the future brings?