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Why is the marketing community making such a big deal out of the mobile web? Maybe because some models are predicting that mobile devices, such as smart phones, iPods, and iPads, will outnumber PCs as soon as Q4 2010!

Tim Bay had a great blog that encourages people to wrap their head around how big the smartphone explosion really is. He does a great job of putting it into perspective:

The Numbers Are Really Big · Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

Even I was a little skeptical at first, but when you look at the numbers… well, it turns out to be true. Right now, in Q3 2010, the number of mobile devices has already caught up to the number of PCs.

Is this the end of the PC? Of course not - PCs and mobile devices provide the user with vastly different services. One simply cannot replace the other. But it is the end of something. It is the end of PC-centric marketing. Mobile marketing, with its greater reach and the power of immediacy, is about to become king…