Wolfson chips should make multimedia phones universal
Rating: Only 12 per cent of all handsets left out by 2011
It’s the kind of prediction which rings true. If you can massively increase the length of time over which a handset can play music, then all mobile phones will be used as MP3 players.
And that’s exactly what chipmaker, Wolfson, reckons it has done.
The company is claiming a massive leap in typical playback times for mobile phones when being used to serve up music. It claims a typical multimedia phone today would flatten the battery in 14 to 24 hours.
Which, as Wolfson’s Peter Frith observed, is too low. People want their mobile phones to work when a call arrives. They don’t want it to cut out at a critical moment just because they’ve been listening to Pink Floyd.
Frith reckons his company’s latest chips have increased playback times to 120 hours – so in some cases by a factor of ten. At that rate nobody’s going to find the handset battery is flat just because they’ve been listening to music.
It follows that if Wolfson has really fixed the problem then everyone will want to music enable their handsets. That is exactly what figures shown by Wolfson - but based on research by iSuppli - appear to backup.
The pair say that by 2011 an impressive 88 per cent of all shipped mobile handsets will be multimedia enabled. Quite frankly that’s almost all mobile phones that count.
The figure compares to just half (51 per cent) of all mobile handsets shipped in 2005 which were multimedia enabled.
The point here is that awareness of phones being able to consume music content will be almost universal. What a great position for the mobile phone industry to be in.
Interestingly, the Wolfson figures also give an insight into winners and losers. Apparently, last year (2007) Nokia had the Lion’s share of shipped multimedia phones (38 per cent). Motorola and Samsung were tied on 14 per cent.
By contrast, Sony Ericsson which really should be snatching a big chunk of this sector, managed only 9 per cent, while LG came in with seven per cent.
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