We all have the smartphone. In fact “smartphone” is a bit of an understatement these days. Mobile computing, recording, and distribution is reaching points now never thought possible even 10 years ago.

Superscreen as featured on Kickstarter

Smartphones are now even stealing workflows that have traditionally been the mainstay of the desktop experience: the full-sized work station. A recent Kickstarter campaign has endeavoured to build a tablet-like screen that uses your phone’s computing power to enlarge your experience, without the cost of a full-sized tablet. Their primary goal was to raise $50,000, and are now nearing $2.6 million worth of backer funding. People are excited to back the development of the device (2 of our staff among them) to leverage their phone on a bigger screen.

Samsung DeX
(Credit: Samsung)

In the mainstream, Samsung’s recent launch of the Galaxy S8 included an announcement of the DeX docking station as a means for you to “Leave your computer behind” by connecting your phone’s processing power to your hi-def displays.

All this re-enforces an interesting part of the stats that we discovered when reviewing 2016 device usage numbers.

Firstly as expected, desktop usage continued to lose ground to mobile devices in 2016, however when we separated tablet usage from smartphone usage, we saw a reversal in recent years’ trends: tablet usage plateaued (in some cases decreased) with smartphones picking up the slack and more.

It’s obvious; people are buying bigger, faster smartphones and leaving their tablets and desktop computers at home collecting dust.