Nokia and Microsoft thought that their partnership with WP7 was going to take the mobile giants Nokia back to the top and send WP7 soaring through the roof to compete with Android and IOS. However, some current figures may suggest otherwise.
Nokia’s first two WP7.5 handsets were the Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800; the 710 was a midrange smartphone and not the one Nokia were keeping an eye on. Nokia were hoping the Lumia 800 could be the smartphone to save their bacon.
As a mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia had been previously been trying to push Symbian as their OS of choice, but it was quickly falling behind Android and iOS. Because of this Nokia looked to switch to MeeGo. After developing a brilliant platform for MeeGo, Nokia struck a deal with Microsoft and MeeGo was thrown to the dirt (this will come back to bite Nokia in the future, mark my words).
Nokia did however release one MeeGo, handset the Nokia N9, which is essentially the same shell as the Lumia 800 and side-by-side you would not be blamed for mixing the two up.
This has, however, put a spanner in the works for Nokia as they were hoping the Lumia 800 was going to be a massive hit and a big seller, but this has not been the case. The Lumia 800 is on track to sell only 500,000 sets before the end of 2011, which is a low amount of sales for a flagship device from a company like Nokia, and will definitely not be something they will be thrilled about.
According to the Pacific Crest Securities analyst firm, Nokia may have shipped less than 1 million Windows Phone smartphones for the quarter, with only 500,000 sold to end-users.
On the other side of the coin, Nokia has seen impressive success for the Lumia 800 in France. After only being on sale for around a week, the Mango-touting handset had reached number 1 in the sales charts for the Orange (France Telecom) network in the country.
This will definitely be a blow, it does not look like there is much hope for Nokia recovering its status as one of the best in the business, and it’s possible they were hoping by joining forces with Microsoft they could help each other climb to the top.
But it looks like both could be in for another fall.
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