Well, the war is finally over: and the cellphone has emerged as the winner on two key fronts. For most buyers it will be the device of choice for playing music and taking photographs. I have been trying out some of the latest cellphones and there has been a big increase in the quality and quantity of the tracks they play, while cellphone cameras — especially with the release of 3- and 5-megapixel models, such as the Nokia N80 and the LG KG920 — are now as good as the standard digital cameras of a couple of years ago.
There will always be lots of people wanting dedicated cameras or iPods, but the majority of people in future will opt to have all these functions on one device rather than two or three. They already are. It is no coincidence that in the first quarter, when Apple suffered a sharp drop in iPod sales (blaming it, implausibly, on seasonal factors), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that half of all digital music sold in 2005 went directly to cellphones (including ringtones).
The decline of iPod sales continued in the second quarter, while sales of music-enabled cellphones soared. Nokia alone, a late entrant to music, plans to ship 80-million music phones this year (almost double last year’s iPod sales). Sony Ericsson is enjoying success with its popular Walkman phone, as is Motorola with its Razr, while LG’s Chocolate was Carphone Warehouse’s biggest ever seller.
The iPod remains an amazing phenomenon but its heydays are over unless, as happened before, it reinvents itself with a new line such as a much-rumoured cameraphone. Tomi Ahonen, a cellphone expert, claims that with a fall in total market share (of players and phones) from 80% to 14% in 18 months, the iPod is ”wilting away before our eyes”.
Although smart phones tend to be branded for music or photos, most are both. If you want to store more music, you can buy a bigger memory card.
Among new devices I have been testing, the eagerly waited LG KG920 — an 8-megapixel camera phone (and 4x digital zoom) complete with MP3 player — took some getting used to. An initial blurriness on some of the first pics I took was apparently down to the fact that you must keep the camera still for a second or two after clicking the shutter. This is not an instant plus for for a ”citizen journalist” wanting to capture sudden incidents, especially as you have to release the lens cap first and make sure your fingers are not covering the lens. It weighs 120g, with a good sized screen within a silver casing, and a beautifully engineered facility where the bottom half swivels round so the viewing screen is on the same side as the lens; the point of which completely escapes me except to take pictures of oneself.
But this is a powerful device that removes the need for a solo camera for most shots. Less ambitious buyers could settle for the company’s other offering, the LG 400 3G camera/music phone weighing only 100g. It takes photos that compare well with those of its big brother (flickr.com/photos/shakespearesmonkey has samples of five cameras) though it is not LG’s flagship music phone. I had difficulty synching it to my PC, but it was easy to transfer (non-protected) tracks from a computer or phone using the Bluetooth wireless feature and even easier to download them, at 99p a pop, from 3’s online library.
Even better was Nokia’s 3g camera/music phone, the N80 (120g), with a sliding keyboard like the LG 400 but with a 3-megapixel camera and a wireless link to the web plus a friendly Symbian interface. The cellphone has advanced amazingly in 10 years, during which it has been cannibalising almost everything in sight. As the age of the cellphone gathers pace, one can only guess at what it will be doing 10 years hence. – Guardian Unlimited Â