Mobile phone commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion—enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers worldwide were Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, with smartphone sales represented 78 percent of total mobile phone sales. For feature phones (or "dumbphones") , the largest were Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel. A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone".
Mobile phone Q2 2018, Huawei overtook Apple as the world's second-largest phone manufacturer. The world's largest individual mobile operator by number of subscribers is China Mobile, which has over 902 million mobile phone subscribers . Over 50 mobile operators have over ten million subscribers each, and over 150 mobile operators had at least one million subscribers by the end of 2009. In 2014, there were more than seven billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, a number that is expected to keep growing. Mobile phones are used for a variety of purposes, such as keeping in touch with family members, for conducting business, and