You know how in the past, whenever we talked about who sold the most phones, Nokia would always seem to surprise us by being at the top of the list? Oh, it’s because worldwide they sell a lot of phones, we rationalized. Well, no longer, at least when it comes to smartphones (and really, does anyone care about anything else besides smartphones right now?)
Nokia released its second quarter financials today, and stated that it sold 16.7 million smartphones, which is well below the 20.3 million iPhones that Apple sold in the same quarter. In fact, Apple sits at the top of the heap, followed by Samsung, which analysts expect will announce somewhere in the neighbourhood of 19 million smartphones sold in the second quarter.
Nokia now sits in third position, undoubtedly hampered by its insistence on continuing to develop the Symbian OS for its phones even while being recognized for having excellent hardware design. With the recent move to Windows Phone (7? Platform?), perhaps Nokia can turn it around, but the results are dissapointing.
Take the news with some perspective, however. Nokia’s first quarter sales of smartphones was 24.2 million. Nokia didn’t release any new smartphones in the second quarter, and is undergoing a very public transition to a new platform. Most consumers would have been smart to wait until Nokia sorts itself out and releases its new devices before buying, so the low sales numbers were not unexpected. The drop is still alarming, mind you, and bad news for Nokia.
It’s good news for Apple, however, as Apple also didn’t release a new iPhone in Q2, yet was able to keep sales high. Consumer anticipation for the next iPhone is still high, and Apple will sell a boatload of those, whenever it chooses to release it.
Via: The Next Web
