The worldwide mobile phone market grew to 300 mln devices in Q4 2007. According to IDC, the 334.0 mln handsets shipped during the holiday quarter was a new record for the industry, and was up 15.3% over Q4 2007. Total shipments reached 1,144.1 mln units in 2007 with 12.4% overall growth.

Source: IDC

Handset makers sold 14% more phones in Q1 2008 than in Q1 2007. In 2006, market growth was at over 20% level throughout the year.

21% of consumers ages 18-34 use their cellphones for banking transactions, compared with about 10% of the general population. Aite Group predicts that mobile-banking users in the USA, having ballooned from a negligible number at the end of 2006 to 1.7 mln by the end of 2007, will rise to 8 mln by the end of 2008. By 2010, Aite Group forecasts, 35 mln Americans will be mobile-banking users.

Sales of Wi-Fi phones increased by more than 60% in 2007, according to Infonetics Research. Last year vendors sold 682,000 Wi-Fi phones worldwide, compared to 358,000 in 2006.

Almost 25% of cellulars phone users with mobile internet access now use their devices to buy goods and services online, near 20% saying they would like to someday use cell phones as a “mobile wallet,” according to Harris Interactive. Smartphone or iPhone users are more likely to “occasionally” use their device to make purchases - 25% said so, compared with 17% of mobile or cellular phone users. 77% of mobile users have “never” made a purchase with their device, compared with 65% of those with smartphones or iPhones.

The market for smartphones will grow from around 10% of the total handset market in 2007 to 31% of the market in 2013, ABI Research says. The market is currently dominated by Nokia (52%) and Symbian (65%). However, the coalescence of the framework wars in the Linux environment and the growing stature of Windows Mobile will enable new competitors to put pressure on this established axis.

More than 500 mln music phones were shipped worldwide in 2007, 300 mln units more than regular music players, according to MultiMedia Intelligence. By 2011, of the 941 mln handsets that will ship worldwide, more than half will be music phones.

74.1% of iPhone owners listening to mobile music in January 2008, compared to 6.7% of the total mobile audience, according to M:Metrics. 84% of iPhone owners who use an MP3 player use an iPod. Demographic composition of iPhone users, which are similar to the demographics of other smartphone owners. They are more likely to be: male, aged 25-34, earn more that $100,000 and have a college degree, than the average mobile subscriber.

62% of young adults say it would be very hard to do without a cell phone, 51% say that about the internet and more than twice the share that feels this way about the plain old landline telephone.

9.4% of those consumers who bought new mobile handsets in Q4 2007 took the recycling option in Q4 2007, according to iSuppli. 36.8% of all old handsets were stored away in Q4 2007. 15.5% of US consumers gave away their old mobile handsets in this fashion. 8.5% of consumers donated their handsets to charities. 5.7% said they re-tuned their old phones to the retailers where they originally bought them.

According to IDC, vendors shipped a total of 683,004 units in Q4 2007, marking a 53.2% decrease from Q4 2006 and a 6.0% decrease from Q3 2007. For the full 2007 year, vendors shipped a total of 3.0 mln units worldwide, down 44.3% from the 5.5 mln units shipped during all of 2006.

10.2% of users threw away their old handsets, or had them stolen or lost in Q4 2007. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates Americans discard 125 mln phones each year, creating 65,000 tons of waste. 8% of US consumers who bought new phones in the fourth quarter are keeping and using their old handsets. Another 3.1% sold their old phones and 2.7% didn’t know, according to iSuppli.