Stories by: Scot Finnie

The tablet phenomenon is bigger than you probably realize. Before the "new iPad" debuted, Apple announced that it had sold 55 million of its tablets to date. Apple CEO Tim Cook helped put that figure in perspective at a conference in February: "It took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs," he reportedly said. "It took us about five years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about three years to sell that many iPhones." The fact that the iPad sold 55 million units in less than two years tells us something: Tablets are a runaway success.

I like a lot of things about my iPhone 4. For starters, the whole "antennagate" thing was overblown. Lots of phones drop bars if you grip them a certain way while in a weak signal area. (My new Galaxy Nexus does.) And although I live in a dead zone for both AT&T and Verizon, right out of the box my AT&T iPhone 4 got noticeably better reception than my original iPhone. A simple iPhone 4 case prevented any loss of signal reception due to hand shielding.

Around the world, the rapidly expanding use of smartphones and tablets is turning into a transformational trend - for enterprises and consumers alike.

For IT, 2011 was a transitional year. A lot of big things were on the horizon ( data center as a service, for instance), but few of the profound concepts jelled.

There is unlikely to be another visionary like Apple Chairman Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday at age 56, no one who will have anything approaching his impact on the computer and electronics industries.

"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control, and we'll be lucky to live through it."

If you didn't get the message with the release of the iPhone or the subsequent arrival of Android, then Windows Phone 7 has to be your wake-up call. Mobile is no longer just the future; its time is now.

It's human nature to get on the bandwagon of a "good thing." Take the screaming hype that is the netbook phenomenon, for example.

Cloud computing is at its peak of hype. In fact, it's probably about to jump the shark. Savvy enterprise IT managers know there's little reason to embrace cloud this early in its development.

You have to wonder whether Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTTP and the Web browser, had a sense of where it all would lead. All these years later, does anyone know? The Web is the invention that keeps on giving.