Have you figured out what your next PC will be? I’m willing to bet it won’t be a desktop machine. You probably won’t even get another laptop when you retire your current one. Then what, a netbook? Possibly. The smart money, however, is betting your next computing device will be a mobile phone, specifically a new smartphone.

A year ago, Gartner predicted that corporate America will be supporting more mobile phones than desktop phones by 2011. “The adoption and standardization of corporate-liable mobile phones in the enterprise has been driven by the use of smartphones, wireless e-mail, and the integration of these phones into IP telephony systems,” according to Phil Redman, research vice president at Gartner. The telcos and phone makers are further fueling the trend with each new product release.

If business executives are getting new smartphones, they also won’t be needing their old desktop and laptop PCs. For the kind of work most executives do, a smartphone with access to the wealth of SaaS applications may be enough.

No doubt, smartphones are hot: According to a recent report from ABI Research, “the smartphone market is currently the fastest growing segment of the mobile handset market, and it will continue to outpace the overall handset market for the foreseeable future. … Today, nearly every major handset vendor has smartphones.”

This means that there is no shortage of sexy new smartphones, and new ones appear seemingly every week. Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s various Blackberry devices are the most widely recognized. Various Droid phones based on Google’s open source Android operating system are catching on. Nokia brought out the Surge, a sleek device with a physical qwerty keyboard. Microsoft is making another run at smartphones with a Windows 7 phone, expected around Christmas 2010.

Smartphones are the latest incarnation of the PC. As telcos build out their WiFi, cellular, and data networks and boost network performance, smartphones can finally let a CFO and other managers do real work anywhere, anytime.

Of course, smartphones can access the Internet, surf the Web, and run a rapidly proliferating set of applications — some serious, others trivial. The vendors are scrambling to build large libraries of downloadable applications. E-mail is a given. Some of the phones can take advantage of GPS technology and presence sensing. And they can capture, send, and receive video and audio.

Oh, yeah: You can also use them to make phone calls. Try doing that with your PC.

Some corporate IT groups have embraced smartphones by making their corporate applications and data, even mainframe production systems, available to smartphone users. One commodity exchange lets its members access real-time commodity prices through their Blackberry devices and place buy/sell orders, even from the middle of a cornfield.

Given the proliferation of smartphones, selecting one becomes the challenge. It is a matter of balancing the selection of useful business applications, network coverage, features, cost, and, most important, serious encryption.

Watch wiredFINANCE for upcoming pieces on smartphones for business. ###