Analysts at Exane BNP Paribas surveyed 1,300 Europeans in 5 different countries last week about what kind of smartphone they’re looking to purchase and when they were going to actually cough up the money to buy it. Of the 456 people who said they were going to purchase a new handset during the next month (read: December), just 2.2% said they were “firmly intending” in buying the Nokia Lumia 800. According to Alexander Peterc, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, that’s “far behind the current blockbusters, Apple’s iPhone 4S and Samsung’s Galaxy S II.” It’s actually so far behind that the firm reduced their estimate of the number of Windows Phone Nokia will sell this quarter from 2 million to just 800,000. Now earlier this week we reported that Terry Myerson, the new guy in charge of Windows Phone, said: “We’re at 0% market share for all practical purposes.” We’d argue that 2.2% is better than 0%, and that the only way forward is up!
Should you be worried about Nokia’s future if the Lumia 800 doesn’t turn out to be the hot seller that we many Nokia fans thought it would be? Not really. The Lumia 800 was a rushed product that was kicked out the door just 9 months after Nokia and Microsoft announced their new partnership. Even Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President of Markets for Nokia, admitted that the Lumia 800 is just scratching the surface of what Nokia is capable of:
“We made the decision to go to Windows Phone when Mango was pretty much done, so we were able to impact some elements of it, but you’ll really see the fruits of what we can do with Microsoft when the Apollo version of Windows Phone comes out.”
Sad thing is that Apollo doesn’t come out until late 2012. Can Nokia afford another lost year? We’ll just have to wait and see what America thinks of the Lumia and Nokia’s return after quite a long absence.