Ask Nokia how the Lumia 900 is doing in the United States and they’ll tell you that it’s been getting great reviews on Amazon. Ask them to give you some sales numbers, and they’ll just dodge the question and point you to a consumer survey that says Lumia owners are very satisfied with their purchase. In less than a week Nokia will report their Q2 2012 financial results and then we’ll finally have some data to judge their performance, but until that happens all we have are just guesses from analysts and amateurs alike. Nielsen, one of the better known data gathering companies in the USA, has just filed a brief report talking about America’s smartphone market. They say 54.9% of Americans with cellphones own a smartphone. Breaking it down by operating system, in June 54.6% of smartphone owners had a device running Android, 36.3% had an iPhone, 4% had a BlackBerry, and every other OS got lumped into the “others” category.
So how about that Lumia, how’s that doing? Nielsen says that Nokia has captured 1.2% of the smartphone market. Sounds pretty bad, right? It gets worse. A majority of that share, 0.9% to be precise, is due to Symbian. To phrase it another way, Nokia’s Windows Phones had just 0.3% market share in Q2 2012.
Things get even harder to swallow when you look at Windows Phone in general. That OS has 1.3% market share, of which 0.5% is owned by Samsung and another 0.5% is owned by HTC. So despite Nokia making what are arguably the best Windows Phones on the market, they’re responsible for less than one in four Windows Phones sold!
Why are the numbers this bad? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. AT&T sells the Lumia 900 and T-Mobile sells the Lumia 710, which leaves two of the major four operators out of the equation. Also, the hottest Android device in AT&T’s portfolio, the HTC One X, went on sale less than one month after the Lumia 900 was launched.