Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or a BlackBerry in your briefcase? And is that a satnav on your windscreen?

You may not have been paying attention but, gradually, the world is moving into a post-PC era, even if it doesn't feel like that between 9am and 7pm when many of us spend those hours in the office gazing at Microsoft programs.

It is also why Fru Hazlitt, the chief executive of GCap Media, was right to give up on digital radio over the airwaves this week.

Take the iPhone. After years of mobile internet disappointment, at last we have a device that people want to use to surf while lying on the sofa. Why? Because it uses the speed of domestic wi-fi - good for fixed operators and bad for mobile companies which have blown zillions on poor third-generation services - and is well designed. No wonder Google has found that iPhone users make 50 times more web searches compared with any other mobile.

Eye up the portable computing space and Microsoft barely registers a presence. Despite its best efforts, it is nowhere to be seen when it comes to mobiles. The same applies to in-car satellite navigation systems, while it struggles to make its presence felt in the handheld market.

Microsoft's share price has barely moved in the past 12 months. Yet RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry, is up about 75 per cent while Apple has risen 50 per cent. Then there's Nokia, the ubiquitious mobile phone maker, whose shares are 40 per cent ahead. It shows where investors think the action is ... on the sofa.

The iPhone has, on its default screen, a YouTube button that offers delights such as gigs filmed from the back row. Google's aspirations to gain a foothold on the small screen hardly stop there, with the search engine showing off its Android mobile phone system in Barcelona this week. Perhaps this explains why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!, which runs searches on a few mobiles, although one could say the $42 billion (£21 billion) might be better spent pursuing RIM or a mobile maker.

All of which leads back, not all that obviously, to GCap Media, the home of Classic FM. Why bother to get up from the sofa to turn on that expensive, retro-styled DAB radio to listen to Birdsong when it would be a lot easier to press a Classic FM buttton on an iPhone?

Internet transmission uses global standards while DAB is confined largely to one country, which British media executives and policymakers arrogantly believed would be followed by a grateful world.

That won't happen. What will is that a wide variety of “soft” radios - those that run on software in mobiles and the internet - will emerge and gradually they will become the dominant way to listen, while the BBC and, more worryingly, Channel 4 have spent small fortunes backing the white elephant that is DAB and its overpriced hardware receivers.

— Some might think it excessive, but try making three illegal downloads of copyright material and you couldfind your internet is cut off. Fair enough if you are an under pressure record company executive, perhaps, but utterly fascistic to most everybody else. Of course, it is just an idea and a hugely impractical one at that. How would you identify the user? Presumably, universities with open wireless connections will be banned immediately because of the amount of downloading done by students.

What about cost of monitoring what people download, which has to be paid by the internet providers? Is Hollywood, whose profits will be boosted by such measures, helping to meet their bills?

However, the most outrageous aspect of all this is the idea that someone, somewhere is examining your downloads to find material that should have been paid for. Intercepting communications was traditionally used for the detection of only serious crime; increased surveillance is justified only if it improves public safety but this is Big Brother. Those who systematically profit from breaching copyright should be the focus of punishment.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• Bovis and Redrow axe close to 1,000 jobs
• Irate M&S shareholders demand fresh talks
• Investors rally to B&B amid fears of contagion