Mobile services to hit $1 trillion in revenues

Mobile services will be worth over $1 trillion (638 billion) a year by 2014, with revenue coming from a wide array of sources, Gartner has predicted.

Revenue will derive from mobile voice and data, as well as context, advertising, application and service sales, among other areas, the analyst firm said.

In the future, cloud services will also become an even bigger area of growth in the mobility sector, Gartner claimed.

"Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterised by cloud services and streaming media," explained Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

"Applications will survive, but often as a component of a more complex end-to-end experience involving the cloud."

In terms of device developments, smartphones and laptops will remain dominant in the enterprise segment, even though tablets and e-book readers will become more prominent within businesses, according to the analyst body.

It also predicted Symbian would continue to have its market share eaten into by both Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

"As the platform wars rage, a variety of new tools are becoming platforms' in the sense that they provide a user experience and framework for delivering applications," Jones added.

"These include the mobile web, where HTML5 will be very influential, OS independent platforms' such as Flash, and scriptable tools such as augmented reality browsers and mapping systems. In the long term, some will be absorbed into the OS or browser."

Context services will become increasingly important as phone providers look to offer the best services based around where users are and what they are interested in, Gartner said.

"Many mobile business systems will exploit contextual cloud services hosted by others. It will also be a major commercial battleground with powerful vendors such as Nokia, Google, and Apple striving to own the consumer's context," Jones added.

"Context will also be bound up with social relationships and social networks, illustrated today by services such as location-tagged posts to Facebook and Twitter."