With the rapid growth of social networks, mobile phone giant Nokia is betting that mobile social networking could potentially be bigger than existing web-based social networking as the plan to ship hundreds of millions of mobile phones with Geolocation features in the next 24 months.

The world’s largest phone manufacturer sold nearly 440 million handsets in 2007, accounting for 40 percent of mobile phones sales worldwide and expects that number to grow in 2008 as the global market is set to grow by around 10 percent this year.

The firm plans to ship around 300 million GPS-equiped phones by 2010 according to Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Services and Software at Nokia World.

Should the firm sign the vast majority of the new mobile phone owners (and potentially open the scheme up to other mobile phone manufacturers), Nokia could be creating a social networking entity bigger than Myspace and Facebook combined. … Read more