Deloitte has released its Global Predictions 2017 report, which forecasts a number of technological advancements that could impact mobile development pros. Most notably, the company anticipates that 300 million smartphones sold in 2017 — about 20 percent of total expected sales — will have neural networks and machine learning capabilities built in.
Other interesting predictions from the report included the following:
- Tablet sales will decrease to 160 million units in 2017. “There is no dominant compelling use case for these devices,” said the report.
- More than 1 billion devices in use in 2017will have fingerprint readers.
- 5G networks, which are currently being built out, will be more disruptive than 4G.
- The IT as a service cloud computing market will be worth $550 billion by 2018.