With half of the world's population owning mobile phones, there's still plenty of room to introduce new mobile phones. The new study by MultiMedia Intelligence reports that the worldwide shipments of multimedia feature rich mobile phones will exceed 300 million units in 2008, outnumbering shipments of TV sets.



Multimedia phone is defined as a handset equipped with an image sensor, MP3 audio support, and video playback. It is estimated that 9 out of 10 handsets are multimedia phones by 2011. According to 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."

Given the increasing number of multimedia phones, it is now a major factor to retain and gain new customers.

Via InformationWeek