Worldwide shipments of handsets totaled 342 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007, bring the whole year total to 1.15 billion units, a 15.8% increase on 2006, according to ABI Research."Many economic sectors are struggling and there are fears that the global market might mimic the downturn in the United States, but virtually all the mobile device vendors experienced very festive cheer in fourth quarter 2007," said ABI Research vice president Jake Saunders, after assessing vendors’ latest results.

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