Sales of mobile phones equipped with a camera will outpace those of digital cameras in a few years as high-tech messaging services take off, telecom equipment maker says Nokia.

``In a few years, the number of mobile phones with a camera will exceed the number of sold digital cameras,'' Nokia's head of mobile phones Matti Alahuhta said in a speech at a the Comdex technology fair in the southern Swedish city of Gothenburg.

Key to this will be the introduction of multimedia messaging (MMS), Alahuhta said, the service which will allow mobile phone users to send photographs, music as well as text in the same way they now send the hugely popular text-only SMS messages.

``I and my colleagues at Nokia have not been so excited about a new technology since the transition from analog to digital,'' he said.

Alahuhta quoted estimates which put the total number of SMS messages sent last year at 250 billion, with 30 billion sent in December alone. This was seen rising to a staggering 100 billion per month by the end of the year.

Nokia, the world's biggest and most profitable producer of mobile phones, will start selling its first MMS-equipped handset, the 7650 model with a color screen and an in-built camera, in the second quarter of this year.

Swedish rival Ericsson (news - web sites), which merged its loss making handset unit with a similarly unsuccessful division of Japan's Sony Corp (news - web sites) in October, is already selling a sought-after color screen T68 model which supports MMS and can send pictures made with a clip-on camera.

Alahuhta's comments came two days before Nokia will report its 2001 results. Global number two handset maker Motorola of the United States reports results later on Tuesday, and Ericsson will report on Friday.