Yankee Group column

With all the hype surrounding mobile payments, it's easy to be fooled into thinking credit cards and cash are a thing of the past. Stepping foot into any major retailer, however, proves otherwise. The stark reality is that mobile payment initiatives continue to spin their wheels, largely due to the poor value proposition being sold to merchants

At this year's installment of Mobile World Congress (MWC), held Feb. 25-28 in Barcelona, Spain, it was clear that the mobile ecosystem is moving forward. In 2012, we wrote about how the world's largest mobility trade show demonstrated the growing importance of devices and all things mobile in consumers' lives. If that was the case last year, the 2013 show proved that we're into a new stage in the era of mobility.

I am not a patient person, I admit this. I recently acquired a FastLane transponder for my motorcycle because having to wait behind a caravan of drivers fumbling in their collective glove boxes for quarters at toll booths drives me loopy. Airport security is excruciating--not for the degrading nature of divulging the contents of your life to the masses, but for the rookie travelers that choke up the system.

Mobile devices form the majority of the consumer electronic devices that holiday shoppers plan to buy this year. Young men are the primary forces behind the mobile devices boom, and their enthusiasm for smartphones and non-mobile HDTVs have pushed laptops down in the rankings. Yankee Group expects this trend to usher the U.S. into a post-PC era where tablets, not PCs, dominate consumer computing device ownership.