When it comes mobile phones, we are getting used to hearing the word "smartphones" as the electronic gadgets that we earlier used for just making calls and sending texts, have now become "smarter". We keep hearing the names "iPhone", "S3", "S5", "HTC One", etc...etc. But do you know, that the world's best-selling phone ever is not an iPhone? Neither is it some Samsung's Galaxy phone.
With over 250 million units sold till now, the world's best selling phone till date is the Nokia 1100. The rugged 1100 was the most popular mobile phone in the industry of its time when it was released in 2003. And, without surprise, it still holds the record for the top-selling electronic gadget ever.
Extra-cheap price, solid build quality, great performance and durability made the Nokia 1100 an instant hit among customers, especially the youth. Apart from making calls, the only things that you could do with this phone were texting, play Snake (game) and use it as a calculator. The 1100 did not come with any Snapdragons not did it have a huge display. A 96x65 pixels monochrome display and a great performance (with no hiccups), the Nokia 1100 was an "almost-perfect" gadget of its time. Nokia's team that designed the 1100 named it "Penny" for its low-cost price.
The Nokia 1100 became so popular that even its successor, Nokia 1110 basked in its predecessor's glory at the time of release in 2005 which helped Nokia sell over 250 million 1110 handsets.
Nokia might be a struggling mobile phone manufacturer right now but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was the largest manufacturer of mobile phones. The aging Symbian OS later became the cause of its decline and recently after accepting Microsoft's Windows Phone OS as the platform for its high-end phone, Nokia sold its entire mobile phone division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.
The Wikipedia page for "best-selling mobile phones" shows the dominance of Nokia around 10 years ago reflected by the number of sales of its mobile phones. In fact, seven of the highest selling mobile phones ever are all from Nokia.
The other six highest selling mobile phones ever, after Nokia 1100, are also from Nokia: 1110,1200, 5230, 3210, 6600 and 2600. Nokia has sold well over a billion phones of just these.
After overtaking Motorola in 1998 as the top manufacturer (in terms of sales), Nokia dominated the market every year with highest sales all the way till 2010.
For the first time in around 10 years, Nokia was overtaken by Apple. The US manufacturer came out with iPhone 3G which basically killed Nokia. 2008 was the year that marked the beginning of the reign of iPhones. And, to this date, Apple's iPhones have been among the highest-selling mobile phones each year with only Samsung giving it some tough competition with its Galaxy S series.
Since 1997, Nokia has been the company with most sales every year till 2012. After that year, Samsung started dominating the total market share by achieving and increasing its 30 percent of the total market share.
Despite other manufacturers taking over, it seems unlikely that we will see a phone that will surpass Nokia 1100's 250 million sales figure. Many believe that Apple's iPhone 5S is the phone that could actually make such a feat possible. But looking at numbers, Apple's revolutionary smartphone brand crossed 500 million-mark of total sales (of all iPhones combined) in March this year. Based on that figure, iPhone is likely going to take many (and I mean many) years to overtake Nokia in terms of number of sales. Here are the top-selling phones of other manufacturers as compared to 250 million units of 1100.
- iPhone 4S: Over 60 million units sold
- Samsung S3: Over 50 million units sold
- Motorola Razr: Over 130 million units sold
Now, with Microsoft buying out Nokia, it seems likely that one of the greatest mobile phone manufacturers in history of mobile phones might not be able to come out with a phone that could be their next 1100.
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