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".
Prepaid mobile phone at which point, their service (and its associated phone number) is discontinued. The rules for when this deletion happens vary from operator to operator, but may typically occur after six months to a year of non-use. By 2003, the number of prepaid accounts grew past contract accounts, and by 2007, two thirds of all mobile phone accounts worldwide were prepaid accounts. The history of prepaid mobile phones begins in the 1990s, when larger markets were being sought after by the mobile phone operators. Before this date, all mobile phone services were offered on a post-paid basis, which excluded people with