With a user base exceeding 4 billion globally, the cellphone is the most widely adopted new technology in history. There are more mobile phones than TVs, more cellphones than landline phones; that’s not surprising, but also more surprisingly, there are more mobile phones than toothbrushes.

As stated by Tomi Ahonen, analyst and author on mobile business, Mobile is the 7th mass media – after newspapers, cinema, radio, TV, computers, and the internet. The original cellphone, invented by Motorola, has gotten smaller and smaller, and at the same time, following the Moore’s Law trend, has taken on more and more capability.

This greater capability has led to the smartphone, which is more than a phone, but a platform for mobile computing and connectivity. We are now at the point where 1/2 of all internet website accesses are from mobile devices, and we use mobile phones to capture pictures, check our location, geo-tag things, scan barcodes and QRs, transfer money, instant message, and even play games. We are in the era of the mobile internet.

I was a late adopter of the smartphone, getting a Motorola Droid in late 2009, but I was within 24 hours using it in ways I realized there was no going back. It became my map. As a candidate, I needed to be going places before I quite knew where they were, and it was invaluable to have a connected calendar and google map, so I could go from my upcoming event to an address to a map to get there, in about 4 clicks. Mobility plus internet changes everything. I was about to buy something in Best Buy for a Christmas present, and I thought “Let me check the online prices.” So I did search on my mobile, then I found the reviews for the product, and read them in the store; very harsh, so I didn’t buy it. Can retailers survive when their competitor is the entire internet? Not if they don’t have competitive prices. Getting  information where you need it beats better information sitting at home.

Just as Apple wasn’t the first MPEG player device maker, Apple wasn’t the first smartphone maker. Yet when they introduced the iPhone, with the capacitive touchscreen interface and an ‘App store’ of 3rd party offerings instead of fixed capability, Apple changed the game entirely. The interface and the eco-system have obsoleted prior technology and business models, and that has transformed the high end of the phone market. Several competitors have tried to respond, but none of the proprietary mobile OS alternatives have made headway. Apple has taken their approach from the smartphone to the tablet and have remade that space as well.

One way to surpass a successful closed system is through an open ecosystem, and Google’s Android has been a well-executed open mobile OS (operating system) that is becoming the dominant smartphone OS. Android, with makers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and OEMs making devices,  is providing a capable alternative to Apple’s iOS, not just in the smartphone market, but now in tablets as well, with Motorola’s Xoom and other offerings.

The cell-phone market, which has 3 tiers (smartphones, feature phones, basic phones), will migrate to become mostly smart phones. Android will be the dominant OS of the phone market.  This is not a hard prediction, as it is close to being number 1 already. Android will be dominant in tablets as well. Most eReaders are linux-based devices, and many eReaders will migrate to becoming Android tablets. With a version of Andr

The biggest winner of this race hasn’t been mentioned yet – ARM. The processor that dominated the PC era was the Intel x86 architecture. But Intel has not done as good a job as ARM at power-reduced performance, ie, MIPS-per-watt. So ARM-based processors have taken the lead in the chips used to make cellphones. ARM has a different business model, as well, which is to license their core so different manufacturers can make the core in their own chipsets. Samsung, Freescale, TI, Qualcomm, Nvidia, all have their cellhpone and tablet chips based on ARM cores. Whether you buy Apple’s iPhone or a Motorola Droid, you are buying an ARM core inside.

Therefore, it’s a safe prediction: The future of the mobile internet is ARMdroid –  ARM and Android. This dominance will be enabled by many hardware device makers building to this ecosystem, and it will be similar to the “Wintel” dominance in the PC desktop. You don’t have to wait for it – Android phone offerings are getting updated at a faster pace than any other OS. The innovations will be in the software, as the Apps provided create an ever richer experience for users. As George Gilder would say, the future is closer than you think.

By Patrick