Asked, at the OPA Forum for the Future conference in London, what the company thinks of the Apple iPhone, Motorola European marketing director Simon Thompson huffed: “We thought it looked very pretty and white. iPhone, iPhone, iPhone! I’m just bored of this darned question. Look, there will be a billion phones sold next year - on a good year, there will be 10 million iPhones.”

Multimedia: “People buy these devices to make telephone calls - that might be quite radical. [But] when all that’s said and done, in Asia the number one feature they ask for is a web browser because they don’t have any home PCs. In Europe, the internet as a feature used to rank around 10, it now ranks at five; that change has happened in around 18 months. More and more consumers are after a more multimedia experience - that’s the basic reality. There are a billion phones sold every year; there are 150 million PCs; the PC tendency is not upwards, the phone tendency is upwards. New, developing markets will expect the power of a PC in their hands very soon - in a ‘phone’, not a ‘device’.”

Ubiquity:  “People keep their phones with them all day, they do not keep their computers will then all day - it’s a little bit of an opportunity!” 3 UK’s marketing director Graeme Oxby echoed Thompson’s view on the penetration potential of the mobile handset, playing down on-the-go uses of handsets: “Fifty percent of mobile phone internet downloading is at home. On-the-move is there and it’s important, [but] loads of people don’t have full-time access to broadband because someone else is using it or they live in a flat.” Mobile data speeds will grow sufficiently to use the term “mobile broadband” by next year, Oxby said. “It’s not just people at bus stops who are going to be doing this. Just as the internet has grown dramatically, so mobile will grow dramatically - but more quickly.”