When the mobile phone boom hit in the 1990s, Finnish company Nokia dominated the market with its range of reliable and easy-to-use handsets.

But it missed a series of fashion and technical changes and was gradually overtaken by other companies, analyst for Gartner Carolina Milanesi said.

Nokia missed the clam-shell phone fad and was late to 3G, but it did release one of the first smartphones, the N95. While the N95 was technologically superior to Apple's iPhone, it used Nokia's unpopular operating system Symbian and Apple's iPhone took over the market. Nokia dumped Symbian in favour of Microsoft Windows in 2011, a year too late, Ms Milanesi said.

''Nokia always had the vision, but executing on that vision was impossible for them,'' she said.

News Nokia has sold its handset division was sad news for Finns, who found its popularity a source of national pride. Its decline since the mid-2000s had seen jobs and manufacturing move out of the Scandinavian country, the deputy head of mission at Finland's embassy in Canberra Juha Parikka said.

''Nokia has always been a top-10 company in Finland with 150 years of industrial tradition,'' he said. ''It has always been big and important and huge, but when the real breakthrough came with the mobile phones it was a driving force of the Finnish economy and expertise and, at the same time, an enormous reason for [national] pride.

''But it is, of course, sad to hear that they are selling their mobile phones business, which was the No.1 global brand for a long period of time. ''

Mr Parikka added ‘‘we would not have had Angry Birds’’ without Nokia, because the mobile phone maker created a culture of technical expertise and innovation in Finland. Angry Birds, the world’s most popular smartphone app, was created by Finnish company Rovio Entertainment in late 2009.

Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School, David Grant, said moving the handset division to Microsoft was ‘‘an important development, but both of them independently have been battling to produce products that satisfy consumer needs.’’‘‘It could work in their favour, but one has to ask whether consumers have lost confidence and they are so far behind that can’t make up.’’

Nokia has kept its mobile broadband business, NSN, and research arm Advanced Technologies and will remain in Finland.

Global sales for the second quarter of 2013 show Nokia sits second, selling 61 million handsets, according to Gartner. However, most of those sales were low-cost units sold in developing countries. Samsung and Apple dominate the smartphone market, selling 71.4 million and 32 million handsets respectively in the quarter.