Worldwide mobile phone sales boom

A total of 423 million mobile phones were sold around the world last year, says research company Gartner Dataquest.

This was up 6 per cent from 400 million phones in 2001 and several million more than forecast.

Finland's Nokia remained the market leader, selling more than twice as many phones as its nearest competitor, Motorola of the United States.

Although a lot of attention is being paid to new colour screens and camera phones, most of the year-end sales surge was in basic handsets.