Camera phones seem to be highly profitable, especially since this is a feature that most customers look for when buying a cellular. It is only natural then to hear that Nokia and Motorola have registered high profits from sakes for such devices.

Strategy Analytics have released a camera phone market evaluation which reveals some interesting results. Both Nokia and Motorola first two mobile phone manufacturers have managed to sell more than 100 million units of camera phones in the last year, which has lead to an impressive profit of USD 100 Billion. Sony Ericsson too follows this path, as it has managed to draw the attention of many buyers to their offer of Cybershot phone models.

"Camera phones have been a huge success, with unit sales rising from three million in 2001 to 500 million last year. As CCD continues to lose the sensor wars in the mobile space, Micron, Omnivision and other CMOS vendors have been the prime beneficiaries", said Neil Mawston, Associate Director and Chief Mobile Imaging Analyst.

"The camera phone market is now entering its third phase where the focus will move from Megapixel and basic image enablement to the quality of the imaging experience. In North America, and Western Europe, One Megapixel devices are now table stakes, while niche devices with five Megapixels or more will rise to over 2 percent of sales this year. Features such as zoom, flash and autofocus will become critical differentiators in 2008 and beyond", added David Kerr, Vice President of the Global Wireless Practice.

Other results of the research made by Strategy Analytics has revealed that VGA camera phones are in a dropping tendency. They currently own almost 40 percent of the market, but will soon drop to less than 10 percent. Moreover, they expect that more than one third of the world population will own a camera phone in the next four years.