Music-playing cell phones outshipped standalone portable music players last year - 500 million music phones vs just over 200 million MP3 players, according to a News.com story on a MultiMedia Intelligence research report.

MultiMedia Intelligence expects music phones to account for half of all handsets shipped worldwide by 2011. It forecasts some 941 million music-capable phone shipments for that year. According to the market researcher, a music phone can both play and store music files, although the storage can be courtesy of removable memory cards.