Smartphones Excite eWEEK Readers’ Crystal Balls

This year could be even more of a boom for smartphones than anyone expected, according to a very unreliable poll of eWEEK readers carried out during the Christmas party season.

According to our readers – and we would trust their opinion above anyone else’s – the mobile phone industry will sell a lot of smartphones this year. In fact, it will sell more smartphones than there are people on the planet.

You couldn’t make it up!

While other sectors of the IT industry had a difficult 2010, smartphones were exploding. (In some cases literally – a Droid 2 blew up and injured its owner). But market researchers ABI found that in the second quarter, smartphone sales had grown 50 percent over the previous year, while in November, Gartner reported smartphones had grown 96 percent in the third quarter.

You can see the direction this is going just as well as we can, and 28 percent of respondents to our poll drew the obvious conclusion that eventually smartphone sales would exceed the world’s population – though whether the hyper-intelligent devices will achieve this goal by self-detonating and destroying their masters is not clear.

Admittedly, no-one should take this result seriously, as the other options we offered were equally stupid.

Nearly 22 percent of you were taken by our suggestion that currently-fashionable tablets would be superceded by a new format of computer this year. We suggested one in which the ludicrously compact tablet is replaced by a standalone box which can be placed under the desk. This drives a large monitor screen, and is operated via a keyboard and mouse. We are planning to call this new machine a “desktop computer”.

Meanwhile, although WikiLeaks has gone quiet lately, 15 percent of you were amused by the idea that Julian Assange might push to the limits his commitment to publish any secret information at all, and reveal the passwords of all the Anonymous hacktivists who are waging war against all sites seen as anti-WikiLeaks.

Roughly the same number were tickled by the suggestion that Google’s Street View service, long embroiled in rows about privacy, would throw caution (and feasibility) to the winds, turn its service into a real-time snoopathon, and cash in by offering to digitally insert adverts into users’ own houses in the online service.

Disappointingly few of you managed to come up with better suggestions than our lame ideas. Suggestions included

• A major terrorist cyber attack
• Bill Gates to become CEO of Apple
• All electronic alarms stop working for 24 hours at midnight on 31 March
• Moores Law is circumvented
• digital cameras become smaller (what, really?)
• None of the above, and
• Chuck Norris

Were you all too busy having a good time to come up with anything better?

Thankfully, fewer than ten percent of you thought we should bin the eWEEK site and just put all our stories on Facebook. We won’t do that, although we do recommend you check out our Facebook page, of course. You can join in discussions and you will have a chance to win a prize in our next draw.

Next: what is so great about CES?

Everyone is so excited about the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, that we thought we would ask you what, precisely, is getting you most interested in it.

Despite the “consumer” in the name, the show is crawling with business-related technology announcements, and we’ve been passing them all on to you just as quick as we can, with the help of US colleagues who actually get to partake of the thrilling show itself.

But what news stands out for you? Is it the continued non-arrival of HP’s WebOS-based tablets? The sheer volume and otherwise lack of much content in Steve Ballmer’s keynote? Intel’s Sandy Bridge integrated chipset? Motorola’s Xoom tablet? Tablets from Acer, Asus Samsung or others? The plucky British Windows pad known as itablet? Or the arrival of 3D TVs, ready for our living rooms.

As always, we offer you the option to say you hate the whole idea of CES, and a space to offer y0ur own suggestions of the most exciting news story of CES, or point out to us the obvious ones we forgot to mention.

Let us know what you think, using the poll which should now be on the lef hand side of the site. We want to know what interests you!