Next disruption after smartphone

In Feb, 2011 I wrote in this blog, "it appears that soon smartphone by itself will be considered as a separate segment, decoupled from GSM/CDMA/3G and soon 4G handset market. People's expectation and usage of these device are going to drive this transformation where iPad-like device and smartphone will merge to create one single smart-mobile-device segment." I thought it would be interesting to do a reality check.
First, on smartphone, Gartner's May 2012 report says, “Smartphone sales are becoming of paramount importance at a worldwide level. For example, smartphone volumes contributed to approximately 43.9 per cent of overall sales for Samsung as opposed to 16 per cent for Nokia”  Gartner provided a table on comparative positions of different Smartphone OS in the report which shows Android's global dominance in 2012 and loss of market share for both Nokia and Microsoft.

Gartner Table :
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q12 (Thousands of Units)

Operating System	1Q12 Units	1Q12 Market Share (%)	1Q11 Units	1Q11 Market Share (%)
Android	81,067.4	56.1	36,350.1	36.4
iOS	33,120.5	22.9	16,883.2	16.9
Symbian	12,466.9	8.6	27,598.5	27.7
Research In Motion	9,939.3	6.9	13,004.0	13.0
Bada	3,842.2	2.7	1,862.2	1.9
Microsoft	2,712.5	1.9	2,582.1	2.6
Others	1,242.9	0.9	1,495.0	1.5
Total	144,391.7	100.0	99,775.0	100.0

Source: Gartner (May 2012)

So, I appear to be on track this far. How about iPad and iPad like devices? Let's again go back to Gartner. Gartner says, "Apple's iOS continues to be the dominant media tablet operating system (OS), as it is projected to account for 61.4 percent of worldwide media tablet sales to end users in 2012."
Gartner's projection for this segment:

Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

OS	2011	2012	2013	2016
iOS	39,998	72,988	99,553	169,652
Android	17,292	37,878	61,684	137,657
Microsoft	0	4,863	14,547	43,648
QNX	807	2,643	6,036	17,836
Other Operating Systems	1,919	510	637	464
Total Market	60,017	118,883	182,457	369,258

Source: Gartner (April 2012)

Although there is clear dominance of Apple in this segment, Android tablets are forecast to account for 31.9 percent of media tablet sales in 2012, as per Gartner. Gartner dutifully adds that once Windows 8 is realeased, it will become a game changer in this segment. Apple, however, will continue to dominate the segment for entire forecast period.
Numbers always make a very strong case, however they rarely tell the full story.
Will the consumers keep buying both smartphone and tablets? If they do, how will they use these two device differently? Tablets for reading document, watching media but smartphones for rich communication, or so does it appear.
But how strongly can one hold on to that argument? At the end, it is just the screensize that makes the difference, doesn't it? Both smartphones and tablets at present, are primarily touch-screen based. Communication protocol stacks are available on both the devices as part of the OS [Operating System], although may not be enabled. So why would you carry two devices if one single device can provide both viewability of iPad or Amazon Kindle and rich communication capabilities of a smartphone? In fact, if you had options you are likely to consider little larger screen size for tablet, especially for watching HD media content. What if the screen were foldable? That would let us spread out the screen when we need and fold it neatly to fit into smaller dimensions of smartphones when we do not need. That way smartphone could double as media tablet.
There is another option too! Thanks to large scale proliferation of 3D content, people are getting comfortable to wear special glasses. What if we could have a special viewing glass for display device? That glass would convert the smartphone to media device. Fact is however futuristic they sound, the technology is almost within our grasp. We already have OLED display that is as flexible and hundred times as thin as human hair. Called spintronics OLED, they promise to be more efficient and brighter compared to present OLEDs Within a year or two, these devices will replace all exisitng display devices on tablets or smartphones.
Thanks to continuous miniaturization of processors, multi-core CPUs already are finding their ways to smartphones, which means computing bandwidth will never be a bottleneck for these devices. One can expect to watch 3D media content over these mobile devices in very near future. If there is anything, the question is how fast will be the transition of these technologies. Given that almost entire electronics manufacturing of the world is getting concentrated in China and its neighbours, it is very likely that technology replication will be rapid bringing down the overall adoption cost dramatically for the entire handset industry. One in fact can expect that the technology upgrade will be viral pushing the latest of technology changes to the cheapest of the devices.
So it is quite apparent that display device will bring the next disruption to this segment. When it will, it is expected to sweep all the three segments of smartphones, tablets and laptops converting them to a single unified huge segment of mobile devices. It is too be seen who will ride that wave of disruption. Will it be a chinese player, this time?