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 recycling The reasoning behind this is that reusing leads to a decreased amount of resources being extracted from the environment, therefore minimizing the impact. Some predict revenues for the US mobile phone recycling industry will see a notable increase until at least 2019, due to an upturn in mobile phone ownership a thus a larger base of phones available for recycling.. Approximately 150 million mobile phones are discarded each year in the USA. Up to 35 000 pounds of copper and 772 pounds of silver can be recovered per 1 million devices recycled. A 'marginal' amount of gold and palladium has