According to Sir David Brown, Chairman of Motorola, the mobile industry had no idea how successful they would become. Speaking at a conference in 2006, he admitted that in the mid-1980s the mobile phone industry estimated that by the year 2000, there would be a market for about 900,000 mobile phones worldwide.
When we reached the millennium, he said, 900,000 phones were being sold every 19 hours. And although the mobile market is now mature it still continues to grow at a phenomenal pace.
At the end of 2006 there were nearly 2.7 billion mobile phone subscribers globally, according to research firm Informa Telecoms and Media.
In 2007 Informa predicts that the total number of subscribers will top three billion for the first time, almost half of the world's population. "The power of mobile communications just keeps on getting greater and greater," said chief research officer Mark Newman.
In 2006, nearly 950 million handsets were sold around the world, while in 2007, this figure is expected to pass the one billion mark. The strongest demand for handsets is in the developing markets of India, China, Africa and Latin America. Many of the phones sold in these areas tend to be fairly simple designs. But in the more developed parts of the world there is a desire for slimline, gadget-packed devices. They have changed so much that engineers at Motorola now refer to them as "the device formerly known as the mobile phone".
Today in established markets such as Europe, no mobile phone is complete without an MP3 player, high resolution camera and an array of complex games. And as technology continues to get smaller, memory cheaper and software more sophisticated, more and more features will be packed into these digital Swiss army knives. "Over the next year you're going to see the first true convergence of features," said Joe Bennett, head of sales at Unique Distribution, one of the largest distributors of mobile phones in the UK.
Until now users have had to compromise on mobile phones, so for example if you wanted a high quality camera, few handsets would also offer the storage necessary to carry around a few thousand MP3s. "In 2007 this will change and the user will have the option of combining many more features on one chosen mobile device," said Mr Bennett.
The New Year will also bring a new raft of services bidding for your time and wallet. Mobile TV is being touted as the next big thing, but the killer application could be integrated personal satellite navigation. "In the same way that we've seen a sudden explosion of satellite navigation in cars, we expect to see the same thing on mobile phones," said Mr Bennett.
Smartphone sales have increased by 75.5% in the last year to 37.4 million units, according to analysts Gartner. This sharp rise, as well as offering greater functionality to handsets, may also cause a shake-up of the mobile industry.
Voice over IP (VoIP) is starting to make in roads into the mobile market. Services such as Skype and Barablu can already be used on certain phones, potentially allowing cheaper voice calls.
However, data charges for many networks still remain high and many of the services are incompatible with one another. In addition, the need for a wi-fi enabled phone for many of the services means that VoIP will probably only trickle on to the market in the New Year. "VoIP will start to become big through 2007, but it probably won't explode until 2008," said Mr Bennett.
