14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia may be the leader when it comes to smartphone sales, but in terms of music phones, things look rather different. Out of 220 mobile phone models that can be used for music listening, the top ten models represent about half of the music phones owned in the UK.
Out of the ten, six are Sony Ericsson phones. According to the figures from Metrics, a mobile market authority, the number of customers that own a music phone (otherwise known as phone that can be used for listening to and storing music on) is constantly growing, both in the US and Western Europe.
The UK is the leader with 40 percent, followed by Germany (34 percent), Italy (32 percent), Spain (29 percent) and France (23 percent). In the US, a considerably smaller number of music phone owners has been recorded, with around 17 percent of the 33 million mobile subscribers owning such a handset. However, it has shown great improvement in the past year, with an increase of 385 percent from January last year until the same period this year.
"There are plenty of musicphones which can play music, but a small handful of these, designed and marketed specifically for music playback, is accelerating awareness and interest in hybrid phone/music players," said Jen Wu, analyst, M:Metrics. "Predictably, music activity is considerably higher on music-focused phones: for example, 67 percent of Sony Ericsson W850i owners in the UK listen to sideloaded music on their phone, compared with only 28 percent of overall musicphone owners in the UK."
Since they are usually user-friendly and boast quite a lot a of music dedicated features, it's not a surprise that Sony Ericsson phones are the most appealing in the eyes of the music fans. Quite surprisingly, most UK customers own a Sony Ericsson K800i, even though the mobile manufacturer has a whole series of Walkman phones to offer to music enthusiasts.