Mobiles won't stand still

Around 50 million mobile phones have now been registered in Britain according to the latest figures. This surely makes the mobile the most successful consumer product ever.

There is now the equivalent of one phone for every person, excepting the very young and the very old. Some people, of course, have more than one phone - and not just for affectation.

I know someone who was mugged in south London and had his phone stolen. Fortunately, he had a second one with which he rang the police. He followed the suspect to a shop and when the police arrived he was able to identify the guilty one by ringing his phone number.

This illustrates one of the unhappier effects of mobile phones - they have triggered a rise in the crime rate so huge that it has made the national crime figures much worse than they would otherwise have been.

The good news is that the service providers have at long last got their act together to prevent stolen phones from being used again. This should lead to an equally sharp drop in the crime figures (which the government will, doubtless, claim credit for).

The explosion of phone sales has happened so quickly that we are still trying to come to terms with the social effects. Most of the conversations and text messages that happen through mobile phones wouldn't have happened without them.

They have added a whole new layer of communications between people. Although mobiles these days can incorporate up to 20 products that might otherwise have been purchased separately (from cameras to calendars), we are by no means at the end of the cycle of innovation.

Last year was the year of camera phones (though they won't develop into a mass market for a while). This year will see serious video games, phones that track your location accurately and the first of the third generation (3G) phones enabling short video films to be taken and emailed to friends.

They will be followed by phones with Wi-Fi (wireless) cards in them. These will enable users to download information at high speed from Wi-Fi "hotspots" in selected places around the country and - more importantly - to make cheap telephone calls using the internet.

The service providers, who coughed up £22.5bn to bid for the 3G spectrum licences are understandably not keen to push a rival, disruptive, technology that arises from spectrum given away free by the government - but that won't stop it happening.

Wi-Fi phones will be followed by phones with radio cards (Dab chips) enabling high quality digital radio to be heard anywhere in addition to new data services. This will accelerate the renaissance of a technology that would have left its inventor, Guglielmo Marconi gasping in disbelief.

There is no reason why mobiles should not incorporate miniaturised television sets as well. Micro TVs never took off because few people wanted to carry one in their pockets for the few occasions they might need it. But if they come as part of a lightweight phone it would be a different matter.

The fact is that, although technological progress will ensure further shrinkage in the components of phones, ergonomics will ensure that they don't become too small to use. Manufacturers will have to fatten them out by adding in new functions - from bar code readers to corkscrews.

While all this is happening, the existing functions of phones that we don't currently use - such as calendars and clocks - will become user-friendly enough for us to abandon our diaries and our watches and rely more and more one of the most versatile consumer products ever devised.

The idea that the market is already saturated is silly. There are 50m phones in Britain alone that will need replacing during the next few years. And that presumes that we don't decide to have two phones each as we might two pairs of glasses.