Apple Surpasses Nokia as World's Largest Maker of Smartphones

For many years, Nokia was at the top of the world smartphone market, making more devices than any of its rivals. This is no longer true -- Apple now holds this rank.

Nokia is in a period of transition, as it switches from using the Symbian OS on its smartphones to Microsoft's Windows Phone. The company announced this plan in February but has yet to release any devices running this operating system. This lead to poor sales in the April-June period -- the company sold just 16.7 million smartphones, a 31% decline from the previous quarter.

Apple, on the other hand, is enjoying increasing sales of its iPhone. During the April-June quarter, it sold 20.3 million units. Not only was this enough to set a new company record, it pushed Apple past Nokia in the competition to be the world's largest smartphone maker.

It's possible Nokia won't even hold on to the Number Two ranking for very long. Samsung is set to announce the results of its most recent financial quarter soon, and some analysts have predicted that this company is going to reveal that it outsold Nokia.

Nokia still made a profit last quarter, pulling in €391. Still, that was a significant decline from the €704 million profit in the previous quarter, and the €660 million the company took in during the same period of last year.