Last year, worldwide smartphone sales exceeded 180 million units, according to market research firm Parks Associates. Within four years, the firm expects that total to reach 400 million units, and sales of the handsets will exceed sales of PCs.
This compares with sales of around 300 million PCs, and, depending on which analysts' statistics appeal most, between 160 million and 180 million laptop computers. Sales of desktop PCs have already levelled out, at least in western markets.
Sales of laptops continue to grow at a fairly healthy rate of around 25 per cent a year. But even at that pace, smartphones will overtake computers, at least in terms of the number of new devices sold, in the next couple of years.
The impact on enterprises could be profound. Potentially, businesses will have access to portable, flexible and powerful devices. Economies of scale, boosted by consumer sales, are driving down costs, and the competition between mobile networks means even high-end smartphones can be bought very cheaply indeed, thanks to operator subsidies.
But the industry could be storing up a problem for the future.
As more businesses start to use more smartphones, they will make more demands from the manufacturers and the mobile network operators in areas where, frankly, they are often weak. These areas are ease of use and reliability.
PC makers have come in for criticism in the past on both scores, but today's Windows 7 PCs and Mac OS X computers are actually very reliable and user friendly. Even Linux regarded just a few years ago as purely for geeks has started to appeal to a wider audience, not least because of its use in low-cost netbooks.
Smartphones, though, have a long way to go before they reach that level of reliability, and even further before they reach the level of dependability and ease of use that a business might rightly expect from a truck, a machine tool or a photocopier.
If this columnist's personal experience is anything to go by, most smartphone makers need to go back to the drawing board.
Of three devices in regular use, each on a major smartphone platform, one has applications that frequently crash for no apparent reason, and regularly refuses to connect to the cellular network.
Another is unable to associate text messages to the sender's number if encryption is turned on, rendering it impossible to reply to texts.
The third froze completely when GPS was switched on following a software update, and only removing the battery and SIM restored it to some semblance of health.
That fatal software update had required updates to Windows, the PC's browser, and the bowels of the firmware of the phone itself.
Journalists testing and reviewing smartphones expect a degree of flakiness, especially from new kit. But businesses are not so tolerant.
If a new truck behaved that way, the owner would return it to the dealer as a lemon. Unless mobile phone makers want to see thousands of smartphones dealt with the same way, they need to up their game, and soon.
