14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia launched its flagship model 5800 XpressMusic in the fourth quarter of the last year, and the handset began attracting a large number of users around the world shortly after, as the company announced having sold more than 1 million units in the first two months, or around 500k units per month.
Things changed a little since then, and the Finnish mobile phone maker revealed having shipped over 2.6 5800 XpressMusic devices during the first quarter of the ongoing year, which translates into around 866K units sold per month.
Yet, it seems that the company hasn't reached the full potential shipments of 5800 XpressMusic, mainly due to production capacity shortages, at least this is what its CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, stated during the earnings conference call today. He also added that Nokia had increased the volume production for the device, and that it had started shipping more than 1 million Nokia 5800 XpressMusic units per month.
The handset is currently available in several markets around the globe, yet its performance is still expected to grow during the ongoing year. And while the maker saw rather low results for the first quarter of the year, the fact that it managed to ship 2.6 million units shows that its first new Symbian S60 5th edition touchscreen device is doing quite well.
During the second half of the year, we should be able to see a series of new FP5/Symbian^2 devices released into the wild, along with the Nokia N97, expected to become available in the near future, which means that the number of phones running the new operating system might easily exceed 15-20 million units before the end of the year.
Assuming that the phone maker manages to make all things right with the device interfaces, we might see a lot of developers interested in the platform, especially after its OVI store goes online. This way, Apple's App Store will have yet another competitor to lose market share to.