December 29, 2004
MP3 Cellphones Hot in 2005
Camera phones drove handset sales to an unbelievable 20% growth in 2004, so everyone is looking for the next big thing. TheStreet.com reports that 2005 will be all about MP3 playback and ringtones on cellphones."MP3 phones are going to be much bigger than camera phones," says Charter Research analyst Ed Snyder..Sanford Bernstein analyst Paul Sagawa sees the MP3 phone trend not as an overnight success, but growing over the coming years as 3G takes hold and hard disk storage becomes available in phones. He expects total phone sales will grow somewhere between 10% and 12% next year. "Long term," says Sagawa, "I expect most phones above entry level will have both camera and MP3 by 2006."
Apple as always is right on top of this wave with an iTunes enabled Motorola phone slated for early 2005. LG, Nokia, and Samsung are also coming out with Mp3 phones in the coming months.
I'm a bit of skeptic as the storage capacity still won't rival the 4-20 gigabytes found on a typical iPod. I hardly ever use the MP3 player cabability on my Treo 600, even though its with me all the time. But what do I know, when the first camera phones came out, I was like who would bother with this crappy VGA picture quality?
