Multimedia mobiles set to surpass TV shipments
November 28, 2007
According to research consultancy MultiMedia Intelligence, worldwide unit shipments of multimedia feature rich mobile phones will exceed 300 million units in 2008, outnumbering shipments of TV sets. Multimedia phones have at least 1 megapixal image capture, MP3 audio, video Playback, Java, USB, Bluetooth, 16-bit screen colour, QVGA resolution, WAP and MMS. Revenue from these handsets will be over $76 billion.
“Multimedia has become the term of the day as wireless service has expanded beyond voice to include a variety of communication, data, and entertainment services,” stated Frank Dickson, Chief Research Officer for MultiMedia Intelligence. “Voice services are suffering under increasing price pressure, forcing operators to leverage data services to sustain revenue growth and offset declining voice ARPU. Handset manufacturers are racing to meet the consumer and operator demands for increasingly feature-rich multimedia handsets, while controlling handset cost and power consumption. The result is the mobile phone has become the world's most ubiquitous entertainment platform.”