By the end of 2007 there will be 1 billion camera phones in existance. The sale of mobile phones with a camera have skyrocketed from 3 million in 2001 to 500 million sold in 2006. In 2006 there were sold 1 billion mobile telephones worldwide, half of which were camera phones.

Lets take a moment to grasp this: It took Casio 30 years to sell 1 billion calculators. I don't even think McDonalds sold a billion hamburgers that fast!

So if you have noticed an increase of mobile phone photography near your local tourist attraction, it's not a coincidence.

If you sold 20,000,000 mobile telephones last year, your marketshare would account for only 2% of the global market. 2% marketshare would almost seem like failure. Seen in this perspective then the 200,000 iPhones that Apple sold the first day was just a little disproportunate with the hype the iPhone has generated.

In fact, it is estimated that between 250,000 and 300,000 telephones are discarded each day in the USA. Californians alone, throw away 45,000 mobiles daily! The numbers for Europe are similar, some estimates top 100 million mobiles discarded yearly.

The alarming part of these astronomical numbers is how few of these mobiles are being recycled or disposed of in an environmentlly sound fashion. In a recent poll only 1 in 20 phone users said they would be recycling their old phones.

Is this bad design or what? I don't advocate recycling by force, but somehow it just seems wrong to buy a new phone without returning the one that it is replacing. Shouldn't manufacturers be made accoutable to recycle old mobile phones?

Even better, could you imagine a little grinder/blender/seperator sitting in the corner of the phone shop that could recycle your old phone on the spot?

As you walk out the door with your newly purchased mobile the grinding sound of eco-goodness would reverberate throughout your soul, hopefully offsetting the guilt you feel from the purchase of yet another unecessary gadget. 

Now that would be a great design!