Nokia

Nokia has perhaps the longest and the richest history when it comes to manufacturing popular mobile devices and rolling out wireless technologies. The Finland based company started out with rather humble beginnings as a company with just one paper mill. Nokia went on to become the largest vendor of mobile phones in the period starting from 1998 to about 2008. With its line of feature phones doing well, Nokia entered the smartphone space too with its Symbian smartphones and was arguably the biggest player of smartphones until the iPhone and Android decided to write the rules of the success game themselves. Seeing the major uproar in the smartphone demands, Nokia tied up with Microsoft for being the single largest device manufacturer of Windows Phone devices with Lumia range of phones. In 2013, it was announced that the mobility division of Nokia would be acquired by Microsoft, which would result in all Lumia devices using the brand name of Microsoft rather than Nokia. The acquisition was completed in 2014, which is when the first Microsoft branded Lumia device was released.