Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford created shockwaves earlier this week by saying smartphones would be the death of home PCs within a few years.
Clifford made his claim at the Symbian Smartphone Show earlier this week, so perhaps there was an element of 'preaching to the converted' involved. Now, however, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research has hit back saying that this isn't likely to be the case.
Ian Fogg, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research , said today that while smartphones and standard mobile phones would continue to evolve and would certainly become far more than just phones in the future, PCs would evolve themselves.
"The mobile phone industry is already marketing smartphones as multimedia computers, but it is unlikely that they will play PCs out of the market," he said.
"We've seen the number of devices per person rise and rise over the past decade and we believe that this trend will continue.
"We are now used to having different devices for different purposes: a massive computer screen with powerful graphics if you're a gamer; or a high-end digital camera for photography enthusiasts, for example. I don't believe that people would happily replace these with a relatively small screen or lower-end camera on a smartphone," he stated.
He added that the PC would retain its popularity due to the flexibility it offers relative to other devices.
