EA Mobile's Euro boss Javier Ferreira has delivered a bullish verdict on the health of the mobile games market, claiming that there were around 100 million paid downloads in 2007, and that mobile games are the second largest mobile content category in term of usage behind ringtones – and only just behind.

"For me, that takes this industry beyond the idea of a niche, small industry, and really takes it forward into a mass market proposition," he said, speaking at an EA Mobile roundtable in London this morning.

Sadly, Ferreira wouldn't divulge what EA Mobile's share of those 100 million downloads was, although he's as bullish in claiming top dog position in the global mobile games market, despite rival Gameloft's claims that it had overtaken EA Mobile.

"We don't claim that we are the number one publisher worldwide: mathematics prove that we are," he says. "We did $41 million of revenues in the last quarter, which was significantly higher than what Gameloft did, especially as in Gameloft's numbers you have DS and other online-related revenue. If we did the same, well, we're part of a $4 billion company..."

Market share disagreements aside, Ferreira says EA Mobile is focused on growing the mobile games market, with the company predicting $185 million of mobile game revenues for its 2009 fiscal year (which runs from 1st April this year to 31st March next year).

"We are committed to the space, and driving further growth, increasing penetration from around 7-10% more towards 25-30%," he says, referring to the percentage of mobile users who pay to download games.

EA hopes that growth will come partly from new business models, including its own mooted subscription service (see our earlier story for details on that). But the publisher is also keen on making the most of new mobile platforms including iPhone, Symbian and N-Gage.

"A lot of very exciting things are happening on the platform side, which allow us to enhance the consumer offering, and which we expect to increase the penetration and ultimately the revenues," he says.

Connected mobile games will also play a bigger role in EA Mobile's portfolio during the next year, following the recent release of Boom Blox, which allowed players to create their own levels and upload them to a community portal, while downloading other people's.

"More and more of our games will start incorporating connected experiences," says Ferraira. "It will enhance the social aspect of mobile gaming. If you look at what's happening on the internet and with social networking sites, you see how gamng is so crucial to those experiences. From mobile, we want to move to a more connected social aspect."

Real-time multiplayer isn't on the agenda, however, with Ferreira saying EA is keener to explore the idea of content-sharing and asynchronous multiplayer – such as the online battles in the upcoming Spore mobile game, which do not require both players to be online at once.

EA Mobile is placing a sizeable bet on the success of Apple's iPhone as a gaming platform, having unveiled Spore at the initial launch of the iPhone App Store earlier this year.

It's tempting to wonder which EA division will take ownership of iPhone though – does it fall under EA Mobile's roof, given its similarity with high-end touchscreen handsets from other manufacturers? Or does the iPhone's capabilities provide more synergies with EA's handheld operations, setting it alongside PSP and DS?

"It currently sits within EA Mobile," says Ferreira. "iPhone shares a lot of the things that we think define mobile gaming, like digital distribution and a limited gaming focus on the hardware side, versus something like the PSP or DS. So it currently sits within the mobile section [of EA]."

Is there a philosophical split coming, though, between games created for regular Java mobile phones, and the touchscreen motion-sensing handsets at the high end of the market, epitomised by iPhone, but also the top-spec phones from the likes of LG?

There's no doubt that EA Mobile has the resources to take a brand across the full range of handsets, from low to high end. But at what point do you accept that you're making two completely different games – an iPhone / advanced platform version, and a regular Java version – rather than simply rezzing the graphics up or down and adding touchscreen controls?

"Spore on a high-end touchscreen device will be much more similar to the iPhone than to a Java device," says Ferreira. "But the iPhone is just a different interface. Our philosophy has always been to maximize the potential of the platform. If iPhone is offering us all these new capabilities, that will result in very different games to a 2D Java device."

Meanwhile, location-based mobile games using GPS are slightly further down EA's priority list, although Ferreira says the publisher is interested in the potential (presumably iPhone has helped there). Google's Android platform, too, is in EA Mobile's thoughts, but not an immediate priority.

"Today, Android is still very much an operating system," says Ferreira. "We're taking the same philosophy that we have with the iPhone or N-Gage: we'll look at the ecosystem of that operating system, and maximize what we can deliver. But it's too early to talk about what Android is going to mean for mobile content distribution."

He's similarly non-committal about EA Mobile's direct-to-consumer strategy, pointing out merely that the publisher continues to explore distributing its own games through several EA 'destinations' across Europe, in parallel with its on-portal activity with operators.

"It's working okay, but for us those destinations are not just about mobile content retailing, but about interactions with our consumers," he says. "It's about having a destination on mobile that EA consumers can go to. But we've got nothing groundbreaking to report on that front: we'll keep working on it, and we're happy with the way it's going. We're fairly agnostic when it comes to distribution."

That agnostic attitude extends to the use of aggregators, too, as a distribution channel for EA Mobile's games. The publisher was a former client of Telcogames, the aggregator which recently collapsed amid ongoing recriminations from developers and publishers.

Has the experience put EA Mobile off the use of aggregators? Seemingly not. "As long as the aggregators in this space are a good channel through which content can get to the consumer, they will have a role to play," says Ferreira.

"But if they become a funnel through which a lot of undifferentiated games get to market, then they are not really helping this industry forward, or helping consumers get a better experience, and get to the content they want quicker. So if it's a pure volume/revenue play, these aggregators will disappear."