Camera phones making 'perfect' picture business

Digital photography used to be confined to the digital-camera market. Anyone who was serious about their pictures required a quality stand-alone digital camera. The situation began to change in 2003, when handset vendors began incorporating camera modules into mobile phones as a means of differentiating their products. The success of camera phones from that time has been staggering.

As the world’s largest handset vendor, Nokia shipped close to 350 million handsets in 2006, resulting in a 35 per cent market share for the year. This faster-than-market growth enabled the vendor to consolidate its position as the supplier of more than one out of every three handsets sold worldwide. It is estimated that more than half of Nokia’s shipments in 2006 included a camera, making the company the largest vendor of camera devices in the world.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/features/gsm/gsm415102007.html