How Many Cell Phones Ever Made

[John1397]

My guess is that there must be at least a million different brands and models of cell phones.

[DaveLembke]

Trying to think of purpose for such a statistic...

FCC might have this info of how many different models since they would have to be registered, however multiple models might work under the same FCC license/permit based on multiple models with the same approved by FCC RF Transmission circuitry. Additionally I am sure there are cell phone knock offs created in china for example that might be their own model and might not have been FCC approved as well so knowing the exact number of brands and models will have a certain level of error to the statistics.

If wanting to know how many were ever made vs how many different models I am unsure where you would amass such information because its pretty useless. Thinking the only information that might be helpful would be statistics of how many people are subscribed to a service vs the population to know for marketing whether a region or location is saturated with phones or there is a potential market to push the sales of phone to an area. Smart phones are able to report back what OS they are running so you could even know if people are already running the newest phones or if many of them are stretching the life of older phones to know if there is a market to target with newer phones to get people to upgrade.

[patio]

Patent Office...

[DaveLembke]

Patent Office might be better than FCC. I was thinking FCC would be stricter with getting approval per model whereas a patent could be blanketed more across a range of models because FCC would require testing of each model, whereas the patent might be more flexible to span across models.

Well he has 2 places to try for that information Patent Office and FCC 

Other issue is that during research you get statistics from a manufacturer today, and the information may be different tomorrow so there is no perfect count that i can think of. As for phones are being made daily and lots of them.

[patio]

We probably won't see him for 8 - 9 months...

[Salmon Trout]

I doubt if there are a million brands and models. Wikipedia lists 161 cell phone makers world wide. I don't think each of these has at least 6,211 separate models currently, or has had during their past.