Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi are nowhere even close to Nokia

Recently I came across a rather interesting video on YouTube. It showed the unit sales and milestones of phone manufacturers on a nice animated chart, all the way back to the beginning. Up to the year 2020, the total number of phones sold, from cordless to today's handsets, is 18,901,945,265 units. 18 billion! Here's some history!

Captain Gizmo on there is a lot of content like this, it's worth checking out. Digital telecommunications began in 1977 with Motorola's first test set.

The next big moment in phone history was Nokia's first portable phone, in 1981. It was almost a case for the phone, or 3 kg with a battery. Meanwhile, interesting names dominated the phone market such as OKI, Mitsubishi, NEC and Toshiba.

Nokia has taken the lead in global phone sales after 18 years. Get it? 18 years! Xiaomi is now 11 years old... The Noka 3210, known to many, has won the appreciation of users for its manageability and almost indestructibility.

A year later, the Nokia 3310 was released, which finally put the icing on the cake. From then on there was no stopping Nokia, who took over the mobile market for good.

In 2007, the first iPhone was released, marking the beginning of a reform of the way mobile phones look today. Steve Jobs' dream came true and all phones wanted to be like it.

A year later, Google's new mobile operating system debuted, with the HTC G1 being the first Android-based mobile phone. By then, Nokia had already sold over 2.5 billion phones...

Next big thing was Android and iOS before Symbian OS! It was almost the smart phone software of the time. Today, it is extinct.

Xiaomi was founded in 2010, but HTC had already released its first 4G-enabled phone. In fact, the first MIUI versions were made for these phones, and the interface was eerily similar to HTC's basic design.

Xiaomi only rose to the challenge in 2016, when global sales began. In its home country, Xiaomi had already significantly increased its revenues, as the domestic market was showing huge interest in the company's products. Here, Nokia had already sold 4.7 billion phones.

And you can see the point in the picture above! Nokia has topped the sales charts since the dawn of digital telecoms, with 4.9 billion phones sold. Samsung is next with 4.4 billion handsets sold, followed by Apple in third place with 1.7 billion. Xiaomi is currently only eighth with 609 million phones sold, below Ericsson, LG, Huawei and Motorola.

These are amazing numbers! For a company like Xiaomi, which has been putting up incredible numbers year after year, it is still nowhere compared to other manufacturers. Although, if we look at the company's 11-year life, Nokia has only sold 7.9 million phones in 11 years. But this should not be compared, because at that time some people were still calling the technological achievements UFO technology or devilish...