With an estimated 800 million mobile phones to be sold worldwide next year, it is easy to see why Apple is in such a hurry to get the mobile version of their iTunes software out to the public so quickly.

Nearly 800 million.

That’s the number of cell phones Gartner Group expects to be sold worldwide this year. And it explains why Apple is expected to announce next week that Cingular will begin selling Motorola phones playing iTunes software and connecting to the iTunes store.

Nearly 800 million cell phones is orders of magnitude greater than the total number of iPods ever sold—and several times the number of PCs in the world today. Nearly 800 million cell phones is about half the total number of mobile phones in the world. [Read the rest]