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Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone

Posted by samzenpus on from the will-of-the-market dept.

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."

2 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Astroturfing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Lumia phones are NOT SELLING WELL. Don't repeat astroturfing media BS.

  2. Re:is symbian still viable? by monzie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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