Posts filed under Mobile Phone Trends

The noughties was a decade of tremendous innovation for mobile phones that saw the total number of phones worldwide reach a staggering 3,973,453,793 (and counting).

Megapixels rose, gizmo upon gizmo was shoe-horned into phones that got ever thinner.

Today, as we start a new decade, it’s worth looking back to see how we got to where we are now. In the process, we’ll answer such burning questions as:

• which mobile phones were the icons of the Noughties?
• how did we get from featureless phones with tiny black and white screens to the technological marvels of the iPhone and the Droid?
• which mobile manufacturer saw its market share go from 21.1% to 4.5%?
• which was the single most important year for mobile phones in the entire decade and why?
• and what was the most successful mobile phone of the decade?

Read on and all will be revealed!

Nokia has released a video showing what it sees the mobile phone of 2015 will be like. It won’t be like this pic – that’s just a concept phone from last year – but it will be shiny, sleek and sexy. Perhaps the biggest change from today’s phones will be the way it integrates with the world around it through services and software. To enable this, Nokia are currently working on a huge range of services and software that will help your device learn about your preferences and present them whenever you need them.

Hang on a minute, though – that would have sounded nice and futuristic back in 2007, but anyone who’s used an Android phone, iPhone or Palm Pre recently will instantly be familiar with this scenario. That’s not a vision of the future, that’s the vision of a touchscreen smartphone with Google’s apps installed!

Check out the video yourself after the jump and see what you think.

A new report by Strategy Analytics predicts that 3G and 4G mobile technology is set to find its way into 20 different mobile device types that are anything but mobile phones. From laptops to cameras, GPS devices to portable game consoles, every type of mobile device is set to become 3G-enabled as the technology and its cost shrink inexorably.

By 2014, the company predicts over 100 million of these always connected devices will have been bought, leading to a golden age of mobile technology that’s set to transform every type of gadget you currently own.

T-Mobile CTO, Cole Brodman, has revealed in an interview with GigaOm that the company is banking heavily on a mobile future filled with Android devices of all shapes and sizes.

In particular, he revealed that T-Mobile will “…follow up G1 this year with multiple Android devices in the second half that we’ll be launching with at least three partners,” and that “we will see Android [netbooks] …from different nontraditional partners, maybe HP or Dell or others.”

More details of T-Mobile’s future plans after the jump.

In an intriguing article, long-time technology pundit Bob Cringely has made a compelling case for the death of Windows Mobile. He is, as he admits, no expert on mobile phones, but this counts in his favour as he has no bias towards one platform or another.

Analyzing the current mobile phone market and some of the announcements that have been made this year, he predicts that Apple’s iPhone will become the dominant smartphone platform, Google’s Android will be second, and Symbian and RIM fighting each other for third place. Windows Mobile, meanwhile, will simply wither on the vine and eventually be killed off by Microsoft.

Having recently released two mobile phones with built-in GPS receivers (the glorious Nokia N95 and cheaper Nokia 6110), Nokia have thrown down the gauntlet to Sat-Nav manufacturers by claiming that GPS will feature throughout its entire range in the not-too distant future.

Talking about GPS, Kai Oistamo, head of Nokia’s Mobile Phones unit, said at a recent news conference “I believe it will quickly go through almost the whole of our portfolio.”

According to Berg Insight, the Sat-Nav market is set to grow from 1 million units in 2005 to 12 million in 2009, and so it’s no surprise that mobile phone manufacturers want a piece of the action.

With digital cameras already pervasive throughout all manufacturers’ mobile phone portfolios, a new feature is needed to keep the mobile momentum going.

The worlds of mobile phones and computing are converging rapidly, as both Nokia and Intel announced separately that they’re developing new technologies involving WiMax for 2008. Nokia announced they will be releasing WiMax phones in 2008 (LG and Samsung already have WiMax phones in South Korea), while Intel announced it is dropping support for 3G technologies from its Centrino range of laptop CPUs to focus exclusively on WiMax instead.

This could have huge implications for mobile network providers, and could lead to super-cheap, super-fast phones for us users. Read on to see how.

It seems 2007 might be the year that mobile phones and SatNav systems start to converge. Nokia started the ball rolling with its Nokia N95 and 6110 SatNav phones, both of which incorporate a GPS receiver and a comprehensive set of maps. Now Tom Tom are set to announce the new Tom Tom Go 715 SatNav system that accepts a SIM card and can therefore make and receive mobile phone calls.

You’d expect Samsung’s response to the iPhone to be one of bravado, huffily claiming that their phones are much better than Apple’s. But you wouldn’t expect them to roll out a camera that beats the iPhone for features!

Enter the new Samsung VLUU i70 – a 7.2 megapixel camera phone with 15x optical zoom that comes complete with HSDPA connectivity and a raft of other features…but, er, no ability to make phone calls!

The Apple iPhone has finally been announced, and it emphatically marks a watershed in mobile phone design. In his keynote speech, Steve Jobs claimed the iPhone was 5 years ahead of all other mobile phones, and poured scorn on existing state of the art smartphones, such as the Motorola Q, RIM’s Blackberry and the Nokia E65.

And he’s right. The iPhone is like nothing on the market. But it’s still not going to worry Nokia – here’s why…