Accelerating growth in mobile phones makes them the largest users (in volume) of display devices. Mobile Tracker, a blogging site (www.mo-biletracker.net) by Jonathan Gales, estimates sales of mobile phones reached 566 million units in 2004, and predicts that shipments for 2005 could exceed 600 million units. Strategy Analytics, Inc., the Massachusetts-based research and consulting outfit (www.strategyanalytics.com) uses much bigger figures to describe the market. In a Feb. 14 release, the company says wide-band code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) shipments reached 20 million units in 2004, representing 3 percent of all handset sales. Extrapolation from this figure puts the total handset market at about 666 million units in 2004. The company forecasts shipments of 735 million units in 2005. Others say there could be as many as 2 billion subscribers to mobile phone services by the end of 2005. Whatever the numbers, the wireless industry continues to grow rapidly, particularly in emerging countries.
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