14 DAY TRIAL // Last year, Redmond-based software giant Microsoft brought to the market a brand new, modern mobile operating system, the Windows Phone 7 platform, based on the older Windows Mobile OS, and marking a huge step forward for the company's plans on the mobile market.
Officially unveiled in February last year during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Windows Phone 7 landed on shelves only in October, when the first handsets powered by it emerged.
During the next three months, Windows Phone 7 devices started to land on shelves in various markets, and also started to pick up Steam, though it seems that not as much as Microsoft would have wanted them to.
In January this year, the company announced Windows Phone shipments of 1.5 million units, which seemed pretty impressive for a new mobile platform on the market, that's for sure.
However, recent reports suggest that things might not be as great as expected, and that the actual sales would be somehow lower.
In a recent article, Russian tech analyst Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-review suggests (via phone Arena) that the actual sales of Windows Phone 7 devices were below the 700k mark, less than half of what Microsoft announced.
This is due to the fact that Microsoft included in the 1.5 million figure all of the shipped devices, including those still on shelves, or those who were offered as gifts, and not actually sold to end users.
As soon as all these “additional” units are removed from the equation, the figure goes to 674,000, which would be the estimated real number of Windows Phone 7 units sold to end users.
When drawing the line, Windows Phone 7 appears to have underperformed last year, Eldar Murtazin notes, but does not explain in any way the manner in which he made the calculations that determined this conclusion.
Other analysts suggested that the Windows Phone platform did better than that, and many forecast that it would become the third mobile OS on the market in the next few years, greatly helped by the new alliance between Microsoft and Nokia.