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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.
Yes, I believe most of those that bought Nokia's Windows Phones didn't know they were buying into Microsoft's phone OS.
Most of them must have bought Nokia phones because the word "NOKIA" featured prominently on the phones. Not because they featured Windows Phone 8.
All this reminds me of those early Net-book days running Linux, remember?
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
Aside from technically literate consumers who might actually care whether their phone is powered by IOS, Symbian, Windows, or Android, would most consumers be able to meaningfully discriminate between these phone operating systems?
Wouldn't most consumers merely want a phone that works and some working apps for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc?
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.
More likely, they're consumers that just want a phone that can do calls and send and receive texts. Dumbphones are still pretty popular, and they've got to run on something.
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
That was a different Anonymous Coward :)
Windows phones are not user friendly. There user screen cannot be properly configured (as with other mobile phones today). They have no options of setting a background image. They are hard to configure, missing features that have existed for years on Symbian, Android and Apple. It is battery unfriendly by nature (a lot of power usage).
For this reason I am never going to buy a Windows phone. I rather move to Android. But I would prefer to continue to use Symbian. But that is not a option I am afraid of. Since Nokia has almost been destroyed by the Microsoft zetaloid that was hired by Nokia board few years ago. But he did work for Microsoft, so he going for Windows Mobile is no surprise at all.
Nokia is going to be missed if it goes bankrupt. The lesson here is however is that never go into a deal with Microsoft. It is going to ruin our company in a record amount of time. It is a fact and a rule. I did see a list of companies that Microsoft made bankrupt with there bad deals. Too bad I can't find at the moment.
They say numbers about Windows 8 and Symbian, but what about Meego/N9? If a platform that they declared dead and buried basically at the moment of launching it, in just one phone, performed in a not so different way than Win8 phones, that would be a big message. There were some numbers around N9 sales for Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 that could point that it was selling better than Lumias, but not sure how it evolved. What is possible is that if Sailfish or Ubuntu gets ported to it (have a good shape for the swipe gestures used in those incoming mobile OSs) it could be even start selling back.
Anyway, speaking about dead and buried OSs, Microsoft killed and buried the Window OS bundled in most Lumia Phones when announced Windows Phone 8, saying that present and close enough in time Lumias won't be able to run it, and that apps for Windows 7.x won't be compatible with it neither. Is not so amazing that it sells badly, even for being a Windows phones. You had to wait till Lumia 920 to have a Windows 8.
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. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.
Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.
It's not boss ego, it's downright fraud: he did it for Microsoft's benefit, not Nokia's.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So wait a second here. The submitter is pointing out an anomaly or fluke in the statistics, and you assume he's a Microsoft hater? Submitter says he'll wait awhile to see what happens before passing judgement. And, he's a hater?
Sounds more like you're a fanboi, and anything that doesn't praise Microsoft is "hate" in your book.
Stop sniveling - there are many ways to do things, without relying on Microsoft. It's not OUR FAULT that your junior high school only has Microsoft products. Maybe when you get to high school, they'll have something different for your to play with, giving you the opportunity to learn something new and different.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
To sell 6.6 million smartphones on Q4 XMAS quarter is a disaster.
Even if you add two OS's together Windows/Symbian competitively it looks like Elops strategy of choosing a Windows Phone OS *only* over *any* other strategy looks stupid. In real terms it has taken the smartphone unit from being 2x as large as Apple and 4x as large as Symbian, and relegated Nokia to 10th largest smartphone manufacturer.
MS pays Nokia 1B/year in much needed money to aid in the transition.
...and I suspect that is personally why everyone is currently going along with this madness,if they break the agreement with Microsoft now...Microsoft will want there money back. In real terms however the last figures I saw of costs of transition to Windows Phone was 10Billion...the cost in terms of staff, output, brand obviously make this figure a lot higher.
One small problem: GP never mentioned any such thing, and never performed any "frothing at the mouth". The anomaly is that Symbian was (according to Elop) supposed to be dead by now, yet it sees increasing sales.
It's people like you that necessitate a "-1 Miserable Astroturfing Shill" mod so, so badly.
WP 8 and "usability in the same sentence? Honkey please...
I still have a symbian phone. It works fine.
Of course I'm a bit old school, I prefer my phone to be functional rather then stylish.
Calm down, dear. When - not if - Nokia go under, we'll know. I expect Elop to bungie straight back into a senior role at MS, with a corner office constructed entirely of hookers and beer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I've got the last Symbian phone; Nokia 808 - works perfectly. And of course the camera on it is truly excellent, truly decent optics, and image quality thats resulted in my DSLR being used quite a lot less.
Recently my samsung galaxy note had some accident, so until it was repaired i was forced back to use my old nokia e63. Funny story: for email and podcasts (which is what matters to me on a mobile) i found that actually more productive, even after 2 years of using android phones/tablets, especially taking into account the battery life. I then checked in a store for the current symbian phone models, and i can honestly say: There is nothing in the smartphone world which matches the price/performance ratio of these.
They are cheap, well designed, have an os where the bugs have been fixed. The UI is sensible, i can take one in my hand and still use it without thinking.
I would rather buy a new symbian phone as a second cheap reliabe outdoor phone for sports etc. than a nokia lumia (even if these are no bad either).
If nokia would not have bragged so much about changing the platforms, the best thing they could have done would have been to put a decent kernel below and keep the API stable.
Sure, I installed Jelly Bean on the 'Fire. If that's beyond you, perhaps you're reading the wrong site.
Now, what makes me a shill for saying I enjoy using my Windows Phone?
Android 4. It's Jelly Bean. You may have heard of it? Now, pray tell, what makes you think I'm "shilling"?
Well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I honestly don't think the overwrought expressions of WinPhone's inferiority common on this thread come from anyone who has seriously (or even actually) used the product. The press reviews are almost unanimously very positive and that matches my experience.
What's a BlackBerry?
I'm in EU...
Have you actually used a Symbian device recently, or is this just a knee-jerk reaction? I have an E6-00 with the latest release of Belle on it, and I like it a lot. It's stable, the battery life is great, and it has a physical keyboard. It does everything I need a smartphone to do, which is why I thought we bought the things to begin with.
It is about the old saying: "fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you".
Slashdot has a very specific audience, and one that has had to live with all shit microsoft spat on our faces for the last 3 decades. There was hardly a moment where their product was better, more stable or faster than the competition. I will not even mention how many companies microsoft destroyed just because they wanted to, either by releasing half-baked software, or by just announcing vaporware. The would-be competitor would come out of market without microsoft ever releasing anything.
The combination of, for the most part, low-quality software, competition strangling, FUD, plain lies, and press bribing made the software market stall as a whole pretty much the same way church made europe stall in feudalism during the middle ages or the patent system is starting to do to american economy today. It was a drag, and a lot of people are happy to see them lose importance.