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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."

5 of 218 comments (clear)

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

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

    1. Re:Astroturfing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is not a good comparison. The smartphone market exploded. Nokia sold 30 million Symbian smartphones in the quarter before the platform was declared dead. The declared plan was to replace the Symbian smartphones with Windows Phone smartphones in two years. The two years are almost over, the smartphone market doubled (or so), and Nokia sells only 4.4 million Lumia phones. This is a complete failure.

    2. Re:Astroturfing by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The key numbers you have to know are that

      1. Nokia used to sell 4million smartphones every two weeks, not every three months.
      2. The current major competitors typically sell more than that on launch day
      3. RIM, which is just before it's new OS launch, and is clearly in trouble sold 6.9 Million phones; almost without any marketing.
      4. Nokia and Microsoft are putting down billions of Euros in subsidies for these phones and more in terms of marketing

      150% of nothing is still nothing. A "significant rise" would behave been an increase of 15 to 30 million. That would still not put Nokia near the big league, but would suggest that they have a real chance of getting back.

      If you take into account the fact that a huge proportion of these phones were bought by Nokia and Microsoft employees and partners for testing, what you come up with is an App market which has no prospect of expanding to become something close to an "eco system" within the next two to five years.

      --
      =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
  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

  3. Re:I guess most didn't know what they were buying! by morcego · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, in Brazil the Nokia brand carries a lot of weight. People will buy a phone because it says Nokia here. True or not, around here people believe they need to buy Nokia if they want a phone they don't need to charge every days (sometimes, twice a day).

    I have no reason to doubt it is the same in at least some other countries. And regardless, Brazilian cellphone market is huge.

    --
    morcego