A growing proportion of cellular phone shipments are replacements (last year, almost 60 percent).  So it's no wonder every year, we see new handset models, as vendors try to incorporate new functionality to drive up replacements.  Over this past year, there was added emphasis placed on camera phones, which are great not only for the handset manufacturers themselves, but also for operators because they can hopefully increase data traffic.  So it was no wonder to see the so many models having built-in cameras at 3GSM, including the sleek Motorola SLVR V8 show on the figure (hat tip: Gizmodo).  The model is really compact and features tri-band capabilities (GSM/GPRS/EDGE), 5 Megs of memory, Bluetooth support, color display, push-to-talk, MP3 playback, and an MPEG4 VGA camera.

Camera phones are tracking at about 50% of new handset shipments in Western Europe, and part of the reason for their success is that vendors have been able to keep the costs down (the integrated camera models is about 5% of the total bill of materials for the handset).  One of my own biggest questions from 3GSM was - will users want a cell phone that can take pictures or a camera that can make phone calls?  Honestly, one could almost not tell the two apart.