Smart Phone Market Growing More Crowded
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The smart phone market will grow more crowded Wednesday with the debut of two devices directed at opposite ends of the customer spectrum: a BlackBerry for consumers with a newfangled keyboard and a Nokia phone-organizer for mobile business professionals.
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Global mobile phone use will pass the 3  billion mark -- equivalent to half the world's population --  for the first time in 2007 as cell phone demand booms in China,  India and Africa, a survey said on Wednesday.
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InfoWorld - Telephones with touchscreen displays that occupy most of their front face are starting to looking like the next big thing in the cellphone market.
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With mobile phone markets nearly saturated in the developed world, network operators and handset manufacturers are turning their attention to the fertile ground of emerging countries.
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Strong demand for replacement handsets in western Europe and the US helped push global mobile phone sales to 156.4 million units in the second quarter of 2004, a 35 per cent increase from the second quarter of 2003, new research has claimed.
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More cell phones than ever were shipped in the fourth quarter, with the industry growing 24 percent over the same quarter last year, the technology research firm IDC reported Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprise desktop phones face growing competition from wireless handsets, but they aren't going the way of the typewriter just yet. Cell phones, already ubiquitous, are now being joined by Wi-Fi handsets and dual-mode devices as popular tools for workers to stay connected. Features that consumers take for granted on their mobile phones, such as call history, text messaging, and a wide variety of ringtones, frequently are missing or harder to find on a desktop set. Softphone clients on PCs, another alternative to desk phones, are gaining more capabilities and generally can work more easily with applications than a desk phone. But as enterprises embrace a new generation of telephony based on IP, they're still buying desktop phones, users and analysts say. The new wave of IP wired sets comes as wireless options proliferate. Cisco, Avaya, and other major telephony vendors showed off numerous Wi-Fi business phones at the Interop trade show this week in Las Vegas. For employees on the road, there are dual-mode phones that can work with IP PBXsÂ for featuresÂ like extension dialing and can get better coverage in the office by switching to Wi-Fi. New software also can bring cell-only phones into the PBX fold. In this light, increasingly elaborate desktop IP phones that often are more expensive than wireless devices are coming under fire. "Why does my $200 cell phone have 10 times the functionality of my thousand-dollar IP phone?" remarked Yankee Group networking analyst Zeus Kerravala. "Desk phones are 50-year-old dinosaurs. They shouldn't be there anymore," said Gartner mobility analyst Ken Dulaney. "All the desk phone does is forward calls to cell phones." Yet Dell'Oro Group estimates the market for IP desk phones will boom in the coming years. The market research company said that 11.3 million were sold last year and that the number will rise to 34 million in 2010. The growth will come even as PC softphone sales grow from 2.6 million to 8.6 million, said analyst Alan Weckel. While strictly Wi-Fi phones will settle into vertical marketsÂ like hospitals, which restrict cell-phone use, dual-mode phones will also be popular, he said. Hanging on to the desk set is partly a matter of tradition. "People still relate to their physical phone. It's like their office space. It's very near and dear to their hearts," said a network administrator for a large Canadian engineering company, who attended Interop and asked not to be named. The company recently bought about 2,000 desk phones from Nortel NetworksÂ as part of a migration to IP telephony. Because it was buying in volume, the company got each set for about $200. It was one easy choice for an IT department that has plenty of more complicated issues to figure out, he said. Wired phones still tend to have better sound quality than wireless, vendors and analysts said. In some cases, they include more phone-system features than their wireless counterparts. And for softphones, the PC's reliability and startup time are issues, Weckel said. The right choice may depend on the user and the setting: Dual-mode phones plus laptop softphones for employees who travel frequently, and dedicated phones for workplaces without PCs. For example, Zeus Nestora, a Subway sandwich-shop franchisee in Tucson, Arizona, uses Cisco IP phones in its stores for a variety of functions, including employees clocking in and out. But while they continue to sell desk phones, major vendors are pushing alternatives. Cisco provides software for Nokia E-Series dual-mode phones that extend office phone system functions to the handsets. The phones are already available in Europe through mobile operators Orange and TeliaSonera and in Japan through NTT DoCoMo, said Chris Kozup, mobility solutions marketing manager at Cisco. U.S. mobile operators are still unsure about the business model for such phones, which could make enterprises more loyal but also cut down on call revenue, he said. Avaya also is working with cell phone vendors on making dual-mode handsets work with its software and will reach more phones through its acquisition of Traverse Networks last year, said product manager Jamie Lawson. "The future is going to be a future of choices," said analyst Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester Research. However, no one wants to have four phones, she said. One solution may be base stations that turn wireless phones into desk phones while an employee is at the desk. Neither of the two biggest IP phone makers has quite embraced this idea, however. Cisco has a cradle that charges its 7921G Wi-Fi phone and acts as a speakerphone, but the calls still go wireless. Avaya lets users treat a mobile and a fixed phone as one so when one is off the hook the other is, too. Desk phones can't go away overnight, if only because of an installed base estimated by IDC at about 500 million. Even Gartner's Dulaney thinks it will take five to seven years for wireless office phones to replace wired. In the end, users will have to push vendors to change course, Forrester's Herrell said. "No one's going to walk away from that revenue stream of business phones until the users decide they don't want it," she said.
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With more than 400 million mobile device subscribers, the fast-growing China market is an attractive one for RIM.
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India, already the world&#039;s fastest  growing wireless services market, is set to become a handset  manufacturing and export hub as giants such as Nokia and LG  churn out millions of phones to tap voracious demand.
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By Anonymous  No sooner has the market for consumer electronics devices incorporating Wi-Fi begun to gain real traction than another, based on high-speed connections via 3G cellular technologies or mobile WiMAX, is starting to take shape.
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Global sales of wireless Bluetooth  headsets for mobile phones rose 153 percent to 33 million units  in 2005, representing a wholesale value of &#36;1 billion, and are  expected to grow 70 percent in 2006, according to a survey  released on Thursday.
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Research In Motion said today it is pushing into a wider consumer market with the Pearl, its first phone with a camera and music player.
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InfoWorld - India&#8217;s mobile handset production is growing fast, fueled by rapid growth in the number of mobile subscribers in the country.
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Consumers are much more interested in what their phone does for them than bits and bytes, research suggests.
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Survey underscores the demand for Apple's debut cell phone.
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In an attempt to increase its share of the business market, the mobile phone maker Nokia on Tuesday announced a sleeker version of its Communicator smart phone and expanded the number of mobile phones equipped with the BlackBerry e-mail application, a
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More people are online and more people are using cutting-edge technologies but the talk around the devices