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Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone
Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."
Lumia phones are NOT SELLING WELL. Don't repeat astroturfing media BS.
Just check the graphs here - Nokia is but a walking corpse by now:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/01/second-picture-in-the-nokia-destruction-saga-greatest-individual-management-mistake-ever-made-nokia-.html
-><- no
The anti-Elop camp emerged the moment he has announced the Windows strategy in Feb 2011 and a lot of people predicted Nokia's downfall at that time. And in no way do the Lumia phones sell well. Not by any standard. 4.4 million Lumia phone is just pathetic. The Nokia N8 (Symbian) alone sold almost 4 million in its first quarter (Q4 2010) and the smartphone market was much smaller at that time. It is also a lie that Nokia was failing before the strategy was switched to Windows Phone. The smartphone unit had increasing sales, sold more phones than any competitor, and was profitable.
I agree. There are many folks who can live without Instagram [1] or Angry Birds.
A good/decent camera with "social stuff" like Facebook and Twitter and solid battery life is all that many people require.
Here in India Symbian still sells, sells well and people still like it, Here are some reasons that I can think of
1. Symbian phones have better battery life than most other smartphones. In a country where people travel a lot and power outages are common, a long batter life is a important. And when you ask and Indian what "good battery life" is , you'll get the answer: "2-3 days".
2. It does the job. SMS, WhatsApp, Skype, Twitter , Facebook are all the apps that people use. Using iFart apps has not really caught on. The downside is people don't use Yelp or Foursquare or GroupOn all that much in India. People just call up friends and ask. Sometimes that's easier and better :)
3. Indians hate paying for apps. Period.
Of course mine is a country of a BILLION people so generalizations are impossible But having stayed in this country all my life and having owned muliple iOS/Android devices ( currently evaluating WP 8).
Footnotes:
[1] = More people can live without Instagram, especially thanks to its new TOS
Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else.
...but had a solution in place going forward with a unifying toolkit "QT" and two replacement in-house OS's Meego and Meltemi.
Aww, that's so sweet. The Microsoft shill said "Android 4" on his Kindle Fire.