WP 7.5 will change things, they said. Then they said the same thing about the Lumia 800 and now the Lumia 900, but according to the European carriers, nothing has changed, and WP7 phones are not selling. The carriers say that nobody comes into the store asking for a WP7 phone or a Lumia. They’ve even gone as far as suggesting that the Lumia 900 would’ve sold a lot better if it had Android.
That is something many of us in the Android ecosystem have said since the beginning. At the time Nokia was still a top phone manufacturer, and even a top smartphone manufacturer (lost that position long ago), so if they went with the most popular mobile OS at the time, that was also growing furiously, they could’ve easily turn the company around with Android and sell many millions of high-end Nokia smartphones.
Of course, I believe Nokia has another problem as well. They don’t know how to make a contemporary smartphone. Other than the design, they’ve used 2010 components, and pretended that makes the Lumia 900 a high-phone that just happens to sell for a lower price the competition. But I fear that if they really had to use the most modern technology in their phones, whether it’s the processor, the camera, the display and so on, it would’ve cost them a lot more than it costs competition.
It’s especially true if they had to put it all in a slim package, which is also a testament of manufacturing excellence. The Lumia 900 is 11.5 mm thick. That’s crazy thick for a “high-end” 2012 phone, when others can make them 7-8mm thick now. Make no mistake. That wasn’t because they chose to make it that thick. It was because they couldn’t make it any slimmer. The difference between the Lumia 900’s thickness and the latest smartphones like the One S, RAZR and Galaxy S2 is about the same as it was going from iPad 1 to iPad 2. And people made a very big deal about it then. I’m surprised Nokia doesn’t get a lot more criticism over it.
So if Lumia 900 is failing as well, where does WP7 go from here? Nokia was supposed to be the one to save WP7 – and itself. If it can’t do that then both WP7 and Nokia are over. Nokia is losing market share in countries where it used to be strong like China and India at a phenomenal rate of around 25% market share loss per year. That means that by the end of this year it might not even have 10% market share in these countries, and will probably be closer to 5%.
WP7 has been at 2% market share for one and a half years, and the more it stays at that level, even if it manages to do that, the harder it will be to climb up later. One more year at 2%, and I doubt there’s a chance to ever go anywhere in the mobile market.