Pundits say our phones will increasingly displace our PCs, which will mean big profits for the right companies.
Two summers ago, Apple's iPhone took the mobile phone industry around the back of the bike sheds for a kicking.
Last summer it came back and stole its girlfriend.
The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and the follow-up deployment of the software-serving App Store in 2008 has -- frankly -- humilated the established mobile telecoms business.
For years, mobile phone evangelists and handset manufacturers crowed that their devices were set to usher in a new era of portable software and services and on-the-go media consumption via technologically advanced superior smartphones.
It would be a change in the digital landscape as radical as when Apple Macs and IBM PCs unseated IBM's mainframe and mini-computers in the 1980s, they said, and companies invested fortunes developing and promoting mobile applications and services to deliver music, TV, sports, games and other content to unsuspecting consumers.
Unfortunately though, the devices the manufacturers produced to do the ushering-in were generally underpowered and hard-to-use. Even worse, the delivery of digital content such as music, games, applications and video to their handsets was typically nothing short of diabolical. Consumers proved to be not so much unsuspecting as disinterested.
To give an example of how hit-and-miss these services were, at one stage fully a third of mobile game downloads purchased via mobile operators' portal either failed to reach the buyers handset or didn't work when they got there. Other problems included hard-to-navigate mobile 'shopfronts' and opaque billing that resulted in more than one consumer scandal.
The mobile revolution looked dead in the water.
Enter the iPhone App Store
Apple had already solved the hardware side of the equation in 2007 with its stunningly different touch-operated handset.
Other mobile devices seemed prehistoric after using an iPhone. Rivals complained that their own devices were at least as powerful and that the iPhone's touchscreen was gimmicky, missing the point that iPhone enabled users to actually exploit the much-touted hardware features such as multimedia storage and playback and photo-blogging.
Then -- after 12 months in which the dominant mobile companies bitched about Apple, copied iPhone's features, and otherwise rested on their laurels -- Apple introduced its 'App Store', a digital marketplace that made it trivially easy for the most technologically cack-handed phone owner to buy and use new software on their iPhones.
Apple also made the platform accessible for small-scale software developers, too, with a 70/30 revenue split in the latter's favour that was far more generous than the haughty mobile companies had ever been. As a direct result there are now some 65,000 third-party applications available for iPhone via the App Store.
Disrupt and conquer
Within days of the App Store's launch it was clear even to the inward-looking mobile phone giants that Apple had achieved in two short years what they had spent a decade promising and failing to deliver.
iPhone users download and use content and applications with a gusto that makes a mockery of anything seen before in the mobile space. As of last month they'd downloaded 1.5 billion applications in little more than a year.
Even the famously tumultuous technology industry has rarely seen such a classic example of market disruption.
Admittedly the bar was in some ways set low: Mobile companies -- both operators and manufacturers -- displayed an almost aristocratic arrogance towards both their users and software developers, offering a lame like-it-or-lump-it defence of their terrible on-deck storefronts and their clumsy devices. Giddy on the locked-in revenues the mobile business model gave them, they confidently touted themselves as the service providers and content channels of the future, despite their clear lack of understanding of what consumers wanted and how they could best deliver it.
By obsessively focussing on ease-of-use, Apple changed everything, almost overnight.
The future's bright, but who does it belong to?
So should you just buy Apple shares and short Vodafone (LSE: VOD)? It's not quite that simple.
For starters, it's fair to say that iPhone's honeymoon period is over. Its rivals are now desperate to ape what it's already achieved, and they still have the muscle and reach to fight back.
Other handsets and mobile operating systems are getting closer to what iPhone offers (though I'd argue there's still some distance to go), and App Store clones have emerged for rival platforms, so that Apple's service is no longer the only game in town.
For all the furore, Apple is still a minnow in the mobile space: It is third-placed in the global smartphone market according to research firm Gartner with a 10.8% share (up from 2.8% a year ago) but it does not rank in the top five of the overall phone market.
As a result, if established manufacturers like Nokia and mobile operators like Vodafone can replicate what's happened on iPhone across the wider mobile mass-market, the biggest gains from this long-hyped smartphone revolution could well lie ahead.
In this follow-up article, I look in more detail at some of the companies involved in this space.
More from Owain Bennallack:
