Google's Larry Page has expressed his excitement about the increasingly connected and mobile landscape, and admitted that it's difficult to predict the next stage in technology beyond phones that don't smash as easily.
"I think that the pace of change is really accelerating," Google CEO Page said at the company's Zeitgeist conference this week.
"You know there are more devices being sold every day than there ever has been and that people are more interested in them and spending more money on them and everything else.
"I think it's very exciting that everyone in the world is going to get a smartphone now. And for most people in the world it's going to be their first computer."
Future tech
Page is reticent to make too many predictions about the changes that this will bring, although he is prepared to go out on a limb ad say that smartphones will be more robust by 2017.
Page:
"I don't think in five years time where if I drop it it's going to splatter into pieces...I'm sure that's not going to be the case!"
Even for those of us in the industry it's pretty hard for us to predict what's going to happen five, ten, 15 or 25 years from now
"We do know things will look really different and again, it's easy to forget that.
"I don't think in five years' time where if I drop my phone it's going to splatter into pieces because it's basically a thin piece of glass. I'm sure that's not going to be the case!"
