Skip to footer

Nokia now No. 1 vendor of Windows Phone 7. Will its gamble pay off?

Just a year after Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership, Nokia is shipping more Windows Phone 7 handsets than any other manufacturer. 

|
Reuters
Nokia is the top Windows Phone 7 vendor in the world, according to a new report. Here, a line of Nokia phones.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Late last year, Nokia took the wraps off the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800, the first two Nokia handsets to run the Windows Phone 7 operating system – and the first fruits of the much ballyhooed relationship between Nokia and Microsoft.

Today comes news that just a couple months later, Nokia is already the largest Windows Phone 7 vendor in the world, topping former title-holder HTC. 

According to Strategy Analytics, 2.7 million Windows Phone handsets were shipped globally in the fourth quarter of last year, a 36 percent from the quarter before. Of those 2.7 million handsets, 900,000 were sold by Nokia, giving the Finland-based company a 33 percent share of the overall Windows Phone market.

Translation: More Windows Phone devices are shipping, and more of them are being shipped by Nokia. 

"An expanded portfolio of Windows Phone 7 models, such as the Lumia 800, an increased retail presence and highly visible marketing campaigns across several European and Asian countries drove Nokia's growth," Strategy Analytics exec Neil Mawston said in a press release this week (hat tip to CNET for the quote). 

About a year ago, Microsoft and Nokia announced their plan to team-up on a range of new smartphones – Microsoft would develop the software, and Nokia would manufacture the handsets. Over at TechCrunch, Matt Burns sees the relationship as shaping up nicely. 

"[T]his as much about Microsoft as it is Nokia. The partnership is nearly perfect. Microsoft knows software and Nokia knows hardware. Take the Zune: fantastic software hampered by just average hardware that had limited market distribution," Burns writes today. "Likewise, the Nokia N8 is one of the finest phones I’ve ever felt but the Symbian OS made it unsellable."

Separate, Burns adds, "these two companies were being pushed out of the mobile race. But together, they’re a major force."

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Nokia now No. 1 vendor of Windows Phone 7. Will its gamble pay off?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0224/Nokia-now-No.-1-vendor-of-Windows-Phone-7.-Will-its-gamble-pay-off
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe