30 Million People with Music Phones by the End of the Year

It might not be all that surprising to hear that almost 30 million people will own a mobile phone with evolved music capabilities integrated by the end of this year.

An integrated MP3 player is one of the most sought functions that cellular users look for when buying a new handset. This, along with camera phones seems to be the future for this type of devices, especially as people now look for more than just communication performances when buying a new cellular.

Jupiter Research has found this tendency among the US consumers too and reached some further interesting conclusions. Even though this is one of the most popular functions that mobile phone users look for when buying such a device, only few of them actually use it at full capabilities.

Only 5 percent of consumers declared transferring songs from their PC to the mobile phone. An even smaller 2 percent commonly download songs over the air. This is a bit surprising, considering the fact that almost 30 million people in the US currently own a handset capable of rendering high quality music files.

In this context, the release of the most evolved music phone coming from Apple might have lower results than those expected. Nobody will consider it to be worth spending a large sum of money for functions that they are very unlikely to use.

"While the iPhone could raise consumer awareness of, and interest in, music phones from other manufacturers and mobile operators, it is more likely to attract a unique market segment, hard for competitors to emulate", said Joe Laszlo, Research Director at JupiterResearch. "Apple fans and status seekers will rush out for a first generation iPhone; music fans will probably wait a while", he concluded.

The results of this study have shown that music phones make highly interesting devices for phone buyers. Still, for them to be fully appreciated, handset users must make a habit from using what they have best to offer: music files at high performances.