The new forecast anticipates sales of 500 million camera phones in 2005, meaning that five out of every six digital cameras sold this year will be embedded in phones. The total should rise to 900 million by 2009.

If you thought desktop computers grew at an astounding rate, Future Image says you ain't seen nothing yet. According to the company's President Alexis Gerard, "The explosive growth in personal network-connected image capture devices is a fundamental shift, comparable for instance to the rapid spread of PCs in the 90s—but on a much larger scale.

At the beginning of 2005, forecasts for total mobile phone sales were around 700 million, with camera phones expected to account for 50 percent of the total. Future Image estimated 320 million camera phones for this year.

Now the forecasts for mobile handsets have been revised upward to 760 to 780 million, 67 percent of which are expected to include cameras, resulting in the new half billion forecast. The percentage of mobile phones that include cameras will rise to 90 percent by 2009.

"Just as ubiquitous PCs converged with other technologies to birth the mass-market Internet, ubiquitous camera-phones will converge with emerging technologies like image recognition, virtual displays, and others that were topics at our recent Summit, to change business and society in profound ways," Gerard adds.

Phones surpassed cameras for digital images backed in 2004. And it is said that Nokia, the number one mobile phone vendor, is the largest digital camera manufacturer in the world as well.