Mobile Phone

There are several categories of mobile phones, from basic phones to feature phones such as music phones and camera phones. There are also smartphones, the first smartphone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996 which incorporated PDA functionality to the basic mobile phone at the time. Smart Phones is set to be 4 out of every 10 handsets by 2013. It is projected to grow at 30+% year over year and to date, there are more smart phones sold then laptop. As processing power of microchips increase and yet the size get smaller,  more features will be added to phones.

The concept of the smartphone has evolved, and what was a high-end smartphone five years ago, is a standard phone today. Several phone series have been introduced to address a given market segment, such as the RIM BlackBerry focusing on enterprise/corporate customer email needs; the SonyEricsson Walkman series of musicphones and Cybershot series of cameraphones; the Nokia Nseries of multimedia phones, the Palm Pre the HTC Dream and the Apple iPhone. In the US, the Blackberry and Apple iPhone are also becoming more prevalent owning more than 50% of the market. They are also increasing being treated like computer with downloadable apps such as the iPhone apps. Androids phones and Blackberry also allows you to download applications that can accomplish many things such as Facebook Login, games, utilities, etc.

Major phone manufacturers include:

    * AUDIOVOX / UTStarcom
    * BENQ-SIEMENS
    * BLACKBERRY
    * HTC
    * LG ELECTRONICS
    * KYOCERA
    * MITSUBISHI
    * MOTOROLA
    * NOKIA
    * PALM
    * QUALCOMM
    * SAMSUNG
    * SANYO
    * SAGEM
    * SONY ERICSSON
    * UNIDEN