Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as it completes its transition from voice communications.
Convergence has been the Holy-Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers. For the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched.
"Converged devices are always with you and always connected," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Last year Nokia sold almost 200m camera phones and about 146m music phones, making it the world's biggest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players. In the coming year the firm predicts it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone.
Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: "We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications,".
Symbian shipped 188 million phones last year, a third came with GPS.
Chip shop
More than 90% of the world's mobile phones are powered by technology created by Arm. It designs chip architectures that it licenses to semiconductors makers.
Ian Drew from Arm said future mobile phones demanded ever more processing power. But building chips with greater processing was not a straightforward.
"It needs to get into your pocket. It needs to work for days.", he said.
Via BBC
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