You may have seen a number of items recently surrounding the Nokia Lumia handsets. Powered by Windows Phone, there’s already some who have stuck together some numbers and calculated that 330,000 Nokia Lumia handsets have (probably) sold in the USA during 4 months of sales. There’s an element of guess-work here, but today we’ve heard more concrete information.
First, news that T-Mobile Germany has refused to sell the Lumia 900. The reason? There’s no upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. The Lumia 900 is effectively walking the green mile.
Second, we’ve heard that Microsoft have made their first loss.. ever. The blame shouldn’t be placed in their mobility division or the partnership with Nokia though. It seems that their $6.3 billion purchase of online advertising company “aQuantive” didn’t bear as much fruit as anticipated. The result? A $492 million loss in the three months to the end of June. Compare this to a $5.9 billion profit a year ago and you begin to see the pain that MS are going through.
Meanwhile, Google have seen a big jump in profits and sales. Net income for the quarter was $2.79 billion, up 11%. Good news for them, but over at Nokia they’re still burning money at a pretty scary rate. They have tripled their losses in the second quarter, with $1.7 billion disappearing in three months.
Nokia, however, have admitted that four million Nokia Lumia handsets were sold in the second quarter, with roughly 600,000 in the US. It’s a lot more than the rumoured 330,000, but things are still a little blurry when we try and define the word “sold”. Sold to customers? Sold to stores? So, despite the huge losses and lack of an upgrade path, they’re still alive and kicking.
Links – T-Mobile Germany – Asymco – NY Times
I don’t think you’ll help Nokia by saying their phone is walking the green mile. The current Windows phone is already good. Whilst it would be nice to have an upgrade path, it isn’t essential. I’m pretty sure that non-technical people are only thinking about the current phone’s capability and not it’s OS road map when they make a decision.
Besides, the Lumia will get an upgrade in the visuals of the OS. Most of the rest of the changes (aside from lifetime of apps/task management) are hardware related, so obviously they can’t be applied to existing handsets.
“see the pain that Microsoft are going through”!?!? This was from a 2007 purchase but had to show it on their books at some stage as it didn’t pan out as anticipated although the tech gained from the acquisition is still used within bing. It’s amazing that the company posts their best quarterly revenue (approx $6 billion more than google in 3 months) but you report on a loss that you don’t really understand. Microsoft aren’t feeling any pain I can assure you especially as they’re approaching the launch of several product upgrades of which look Very very sweet.
£6 billion on a failed purchase sounds painful to me! It is a fair point to compare google with microsoft and and interesting comparison it make too.
Hey Trev, windows phone isn t that ‘already good’ (i use it), never mind the lumia windows phone is walking the green mile for me, and nokia faithful new adopters wont like not getting 8.
Until I am satisfied 8 is worth ditching the existing customer base for Ill be getting an iphone 5 or an android with a qwerty, and sticking with apple osx.
As good or bad as any of these phones are, you ask any commuter how many you actually see compared to android/iphones as opposed to just 5 years ago. There really has been a sea change in the way Nokia devices are viewed these days. Just 5 years or so ago, a nokia was the de facto standard for a lot of people buying a phone. Sadly that’s no longer the case.
Time for Nokia to find a solid OS that people actually want – quickly Nokia jump over to making Android handsets. Make Phablets – to cut your own niche’ — something.
I’d hate to see Nokia fail. They took the S.E.A companies to school with the Lumia. Lovely bit of original design.
I have to think that if Android had been used on the Nokias, they would have looked after it a lot better than most. The Lumia had a stack of improvements pushed out to it….