In the run up to the launch of the Nokia Lumia 900 on AT&T, there were multiple reports that the launch would see unprecedented marketing, with even AT&T saying that it would exceed the scope of the original iPhone launch. Nokia executives boldly referred to the Lumia line as the first “real” Windows Phone devices and at one point AT&T claimed claimed that Lumia 900 sales had exceeded their expectations.
It’s not clear exactly how low Nokia’s expectations were, but a close analysis of the latest Nielsen and comScore numbers shows that Nokia has sold well below half a million Windows phone devices in the U.S. – they number crunchers at Aymco peg the number at a mere 330,000. And those numbers aren’t just Lumia 900 sales, they are the total sales of all Nokia Windows Phone devices, including the value priced Lumia 710 on T-Mobile (which has been selling for "free" on contract for months) and launched back in January.
How did Asymco derive those numbers? Nielsen and comScore gave them to us: in the breakdown of hardware vendors Nielsen shows Nokia as behind Samsung and HTC’s Windows Phone offerings (despite not being “real” WP7 devices…) as having made 0.3% of all current U.S. smartphones. Multiple that against the total number of US smartphone owners (which comScore’s recently recorded as 110 million) and you get this:
110,000,000 X 0.003 = 330,000 units.
That is an astonishingly small number, and explains why Windows Phone market share still lags behind even Windows Mobile, over a year and a half after WP7 launched. With Windows Phone 8 coming in a few more months and no upgrade path for current devices to the next version of the software, surely whatever chance at serious market disruption was available is now gone. For Nokia, who bet their company on the success of Windows Phone, WP8 surely cant’ come soon enough. And if that doesn’t do the trick, their recently reported back up plan had better be ready for action.
Scott Hartman is a former tech news writer at PhoneArena. He contributed news posts actively between 2011 and 2012.
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