Deloitte: 2011 Will Be The Year Of The Tablet (Say Goodbye To Your Laptop)

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Deloitte, the multi-faceted professional services company that’s perhaps best known for its annual Football Money League study, says that 2011 will be the year that computers stop being computers. The agency says that more than 50 percent of all “computing devices” sold this year will be non-PCs. You know, things like tablets, smartphones, and the like. So not only are the days of big, hulking desktops behind us (with the exception of gaming PCs, like the Digital Storm Black Ops), but other traditional computers, like your friendly neighborhood laptop, are on the way out.

There’s two other “big” predictions from Deloitte in this release.

One is that there will be zero operating system standardization when it comes to smartphones and tablets this year. I suppose that’s true, but there sorta is standardization in that there’s only two real options out there: iOS and Android. And really, both are fine operating systems; it’s not as if you’re walking in with a loss if you pick one over the other.

The other one is that enterprise will take tablets seriously this year. Remember netbooks? Those were big for about a minute (well, a few years), and then tablets showed up on the scene, pretty much out of the blue, and flashed that Men In Black memory-easer on us all, making us forget notebooks ever existed. Enterprise never really “took” to notebooks, but that will not be the case with tablets, where it’s predicted that enterprise will purchase a solid 25 percent of all tablets this year.