1.6M Windows Phone 7 Devices Sold in Q1 2011, Says Gartner

During the first quarter of the ongoing year, the total number of devices sold on the market with Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform on board reached 1.6 million units, a recent report from Gartner reads.

The research firm notes that this result would show in a way that the mobile phones launched on shelves with Microsoft's OS on board at the end of the last year have started to appeal to users a little more.

However, the adoption of Windows Phone devices was very slow, as users were more attracted to other mobile operating systems out there, such as Android or iOS.

But the strategic alliance that Microsoft and Nokia announced in February is expected to result in a faster adoption of handsets running under the Windows Phone platform.

According to Gartner, the said alliance would certainly change the smartphone OS landscape, although things might not seem to be so at the moment. The deal would end up in having the Symbian platform retired from the market.

“This will precipitate a competitors’ rush to capture Symbian's market share in the midtier,” Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The availability of more devices running under the Windows Phone would also help the platform increase its market share, as well as their availability through more carriers in more markets.

Today, for example, Verizon announced the release of their first Windows Phone handset, the HTC Trophy, which arrives on shelves a bit late, that's for sure.

On the long run, Windows Phone is expected to become one of the top mobile operating systems on the market, with some analysts suggesting that it might even top Android in the next few years.

For the time being, however, the platform enjoyed only 3.6 percent share of the smartphone units sold to end-users around the world in the first quarter of the ongoing year, far behind Android, which accounted for around 36 percent of them.