The mobile phone industry is currently dominated by rivals Apple and Samsung, as the two companies continue to compete in the market with the release of iPhones and Galaxy devices.
Apple and Samsung devices would probably be the top guesses when people are asked what the best-selling mobile phone of all time is. This may be true of recent years, with Apple's recently launched iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus reportedly hitting sales of 13 million units over the first three days of being launched. However, the honor goes to a company that was once the king of mobile phones.
According to mobile news website Phone Arena, the best-selling mobile phone of all time is the Nokia 1100 with sales of a whopping 250 million units over five years.
The mobile phone, which is an entry-level device that feature the most basic of functions, was released to the market late in 2003. It did not have a colored touchscreen, a front camera or a curved screen, as the mobile phone was designed to be as simple as a mobile phone can get. It did have a flashlight, a dust-proof case and no-slip rubber grips, with other features being 36 pre-installed monophonic ringtones, interchangeable covers, 50-message capacities, 50 slots for contacts and a standby time of 400 hours between each charge. Of course, the device also had Snake II and Space Impact, which were amazingly popular back then.
Sold with a price tag of only about $100, the Nokia 1100's affordability helped catapult it into its best-selling status, before the manufacturing of the mobile phone was halted in 2009. With 250 million units sold, it did not only become the best-selling mobile phone in the world, but also the best-selling electronic device for consumers in the world.
Interestingly, the Nokia 1100 has been rumored to soon be relaunched with an Android-powered version of the mobile phone. Earlier in the year, a Nokia 1100 packing a quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT-6582 processor was discovered in the database of benchmarking service GeekBench. While the device will likely not appear until 2016 due to an agreement between Nokia and Microsoft, such a revival for the Nokia 1100 would surely draw massive attention.
