Mobile phone sales will hit 1 billion in 2009 with smartphones the fastest growing area of the market.
Mobile phone sales will hit 1 billion in 2009 with smartphones the fastest growing area of the market.

Worldwide sales of smartphones, many of which contain the computing power necessary for mobile television, are expected to rise to 280 million by 2009. Research firm Gartner expects that 50 million smartphones - from a total of 779 million handsets - will be sold by the end of the year. Gartner also predicts that 2.6 billion mobiles will be in regular use around the world before the end of the decade.

State of the art phones, such as the Nokia 7710, are currently being used in trials for mobile TV. Sky, Discovery and Turner have already signed up to trial live mobile phone broadcasts from September with O2 and Arqiva - formerly NTL Broadcast. ITV is believed to be considering launching a mobile service later this year.

The study looked at sales figures from over 60 countries worldwide.