US research outfit, MultiMedia Intelligence, has put the level of touch screen phones at a huge 200 million by 2011, up from what it describes this year as a ’rounding error.’ The implication being that whether or not the iPhone wins this race, it will have stimulated a device genre which will make up around 20% of annually shipped phones.
All this comes in a report into multimedia feature rich handsets, which MMI defines as having at least a 1 megapixel camera, MP3 audio, video Playback, a 16-bit color QVGA screen, bluetooth and a browser, and says that such devices will drive global revenues of $76 billion, with 300 million such devices shipped, more units than annual TV shipments.
‘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,’ 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.’