Mobile phones. Around ten years ago, they were a relatively new invention. Now? Well now everyone and their granny has a mobile and, according to a report from the United Nations, the number of mobile phones will soon surpass the number of people in the world.

The BBC reports that the UN agency report has predicted that mobile phone subscriptions will surpass seven billion in early 2014 and will overtake the world population by the end of the year. As it stands, there are currently 6.8 billion mobile phone subscriptions out there and 7.1 billion people.

“Every day we are moving closer to having almost as many mobile cellular subscriptions as people on earth,” said Brahima Sanou, the director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau.

“The mobile revolution is ‘m-powering’ people in developing countries by delivering ICT applications in education, health, government, banking, environment and business,” he added.

The UN report also found that over one third of the world’s population are now online. Europe has the highest percentage with 75 per cent of people regularly surfing the web. Next up is America with 61 per cent, followed by Asia with 32 per cent and finally Africa with 16 per cent.

All this talk of mobile phones got us reminiscing about the very first mobile phones we ever got as youngsters. Here are our four favourite retro phones.

Motorola D520: The year was 2000 and mobile phones were just starting to become something of a trend. If you were lucky enough to land a mobile phone during this era, chances are you go a Motorola D520. We remember painstakingly scratching off the back of the ‘credit’ cards in order to put money on the phone (and running around the place with the aerial sticking out trying to hear what the person on the other end was actually saying).

Nokia 5110: If you were lucky enough not to get a Motorola D520, chances are you had the super-cool Nokia 5110. This bad boy came with a changeable cover, so your phone could like, totally express your personality. The screen was also a bit bigger which helped out majorly when it came to reading text messages.

Nokia 3210: How amazing was the Nokia 3210? It was like the cool phone that you eventually progressed to when you broke your Motorola or Nokia 5110. Back in the day everyone had one of these, and we all spent ages making up custom ringtones (Sandstorm by DaRude was a personal favourite) and drawing picturing messages. It was also completely indestructable. No matter how many times you dropped it down the loo, it always continued to work afterwards. What a piece of technology!

Siemens C25: This phone was pretty popular about a decade ago simply because it was so small and none of us had ever seen anything like it before. It was small but by God did it work. It was a favourite amongst parents who were too ‘professional’ to have the awesome Nokia 3210.