The next wave of mobilephones

In 2005, Motorola brought out the Rokr, a mobile phone/multimedia player that is compatible with Apple's iTunes, and all the other major manufacturers have followed suit by providing multimedia capable 3G mobile phones, with varying degrees of success. However, the majority of these have used flash memory cards for storage, which up until recently, have had limited storage capacity as compared with the hard drives used by upmarket mp3 players.

With the majority of recent mobile phones, you get a miniature colour LCD screen. you can take pictures, set them as wallpapers, and send them to your contacts, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Network providers already offer attractive multimedia add-ons such as track downloads, multimedia messaging bundles, and mobile TV subscriptions. A company called MobiTV pioneered the concept of real-time TV for mobile phones, and these days, mobile TV services are available from most major mobile network providers. Soon, all the major worldwide TV networks and even exclusive satellite channels will be watchable on your phone. The fast connection speeds of 3G technology make this perfectly possible, and it will not be long before broadcasters are bashing each other out of the way in order to take advantage of this burgeoning new market. It has been predicted that, by twenty fifteen, over 200 million people will be watching TV on the move, by which point scientists predict that mobile phones will have average access speeds of many MB per second, easily in excess of most home broadband services in this day and age. Also, it will be cheaper and easier by then to produce big, low-power screens, which will no doubt find their way onto mobile phones as the mobile TV market becomes bigger.

Vodafone offer some of the newest mobiles on a range of price plans including pay as you go if you do not want a monthly contract.