The future lies in mobile Internet – summed up impressively by Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley in her Internet trends 2010 speech last year. The big tech and telecom companies, currently engaged in an ‘arms race’ to secure the most promising position in the mobile market, used the recent Mobile Communications Conference in Barcelona to stake their claims. Google is ahead of the pack with a new corporate strategy boldly described by Eric Schmidt as ‘Mobile First’, whose keynote speech began: “… This [Mobile World] has become the place to be for all of us in the computer industry …”

The reason: In three years, if not sooner, sales of smartphones will outstrip personal computers. Figures from Morgan Stanley’s ‘Mobile Internet Report’ forecast this turning point in 2012. According to Eric Schmidt, another decisive reason for this is the increase in search queries on the go. In developing countries, such as Indonesia and South Africa, most Google search queries are now coming from mobile devices. The Google CEO went on to say that the speed at which users adapt to the mobile web is eight times faster than they adapt to stationary Internet. Here are the corresponding charts from Morgan Stanley’s ‘Mobile Internet Report’:

Supplementary figures for Germany: According to BITKOM, smartphones are taking over the German mass market. In 2010, their turnover in Germany will increase by about 47% to 8.2 million devices. That means every third new mobile telephone sold this year will be a smartphone; in 2009 it was every fifth phone. Sales of the versatile multimedia cell phones is expected to rise by about 33% in 2010 to 1.5 billion euros.

Simultaneously, high-speed Internet connections are also booming in mobile communications. At the beginning of 2009, there were about 16 million UMTS connections in Germany. By the end of 2009, the industry association anticipated 22.7 million broadband access lines (+40%).