YOUR world is about to shrink to the size of a mobile phone. The devices are becoming so sophisticated that all types of home entertainment are being crammed into one slim handset.

This month the first live television broadcasts direct to mobile phones will start under a pilot project in Oxford. A group of 400 users will receive 16 channels via their phones.

After packing voice calls, text messages, e-mails, radios, satellite navigation and MP3 music players into phones, industry experts claim the latest advance means the mobile has won the race to become the key electronic gadget to rule your life.

News of the latest service came after Apple, maker of the iPod, announced the launch of a phone able to hold 125 tracks downloaded from its iTunes library. “Today the talk ends and the music begins,” said Ralph de la Vega, a mobile phone executive at the product’s launch. Next year Nokia will release a phone that will hold about 1,000 songs — more than 50 hours of music.

While many mobile users say they are already baffled by the array of functions on handsets, launches of new services are set to accelerate. Experts say the phone — rather than the portable computer or music player — has won the battle to be the “all-in-one” technology centre.

In future all our personal data could be held on one handset, which will be able to make financial transactions and in addition will be a mobile entertainment centre.

Greg Estell, general manager of Motorola Europe, said the new generation of phones will make people’s lives easier. “They will start using all the additional features and realise it’s simpler to have them all on one device,” he said.

The camera has been one of the first devices to be integrated. Nearly half of the mobile phones sold in Britain include a camera. A new Nokia phone features a camcorder using high-specification Carl Zeiss optics that will provide more than two hours of video footage.

As new media services arrive, people will be able to watch favourite television programmes or catch up on the news while waiting in a queue or commuting.

The three-month pilot television project in Oxford, due to be launched on September 22, is being run by O2. “We want to determine whether consumers are prepared to watch TV on their mobile, and also to see what they watch and when they watch it,” said a spokesman.

The project will use Nokia handsets fitted with a receiver to pick up digital television signals. The phones are expected to cost up to £400 but will receive broadcasts like a portable television and so not run up phone bills. Customers will instead be expected to pay a monthly subscription of about £10.

Previous schemes to put television on mobiles have largely been limited to pre-recorded clips dubbed “mobisodes”. They are downloaded from the internet, which is time-consuming and expensive.

Orange has also introduced a television service in Britain after trials in France. The programmes are, however, not broadcast direct to mobiles but transferred through the third generation (3G) phone network.

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