First day WinPho 7 sales top 40k, claims market watcher

Not a promising start?

By Tony Smith, 11th November 2010

Microsoft and its WinPho 7 partners sold only 40,000 smartphones running the new OS on the days of its launch, it has been claimed.

The figure only covers the US market and comes from an unnamed researcher who tracks mobile phone sales, according to website The Street.

Microsoft hasn't said whether the total is right or wrong.

But if it's correct, it isn't good news for the nascent platform, which Microsoft hopes will counterbalance the plunging fortunes of Windows Mobile. According to market watcher Gartner, WinMo's share of the world smartphone biz fell from 7.9 per cent in Q3 2009 to 2.8 per cent in Q3 2010.

Compare that with iOS' 16.7 per cent share and Android's 25.5 per cent, the latter up from 3.5 per cent in the year-ago quarter.

iOS' share dropped from 17.1 per cent, BlackBerry from 20.7 per cent to 14.8 per cent, and Symbian from 44.6 per cent to 36.6 per cent.

All three shipped in a greater number of handsets year on year. Not so WinMo, which saw phone shipments fall.

Hence the importance of WinPho 7.

Apple is believed to have sold around 1.5m iPhone 4s on that handset's launch. Of course, the iPhone is now well established, so you wouldn't expect a new platform to do as well as that.

So how did the first iPhone do? It's believed to have notched up more than 250,000 sales on its first weekend, though AT&T later said only 146,000 of them were activated in the first weekend.

And that highlight's a mistake Microsoft made: launching on Monday not on Friday, when you can claim Saturday's sales too. Of course, what's perhaps most telling is the fact that Microsoft didn't trumpet initial sales as it undoubtedly would have done had it a big number. ®

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Posted Thursday 11th November 2010 12:42 GMT

The BigYin

Define "sales"

"Yeah look at windows 7 that [didn't] sell like mad on the first day either but its already [the] market leader due to [steady] sales."

It is nigh-on impossible to buy a PC without Windows 7 due to OEM agreements. I do not call this abuse of a monopoly position a valid gauge of the popularity of Windows 7.

Posted Thursday 11th November 2010 12:42 GMT

The BigYin

Allow me to adjust

>Turds:

>Xbox360

Never owned one, but the original xBox was capable enough in its day. It's still good now (especially when it's hacked), I can only presume that the 360 is similar

>Kinect

Wrong on an epic scale. There's even open source drivers for Kinect now, it's free to be used with anything and I expect to see it get taken up big style.

>WinMo7

>Zune

>Internet Explorer

>Windows Vista

>WindowsME

Bang on the money, but IE9 looks like it may be a non-turd. It will, after all, be the first MS browser with a nod towards standards compliance.

>Not Turds:

>WindowsXp

Err...really? It might be my favourite MS OS, but XP certainly has some turd-splatter on it. Not releasing USB devices when I demand it is my biggest gripe. There are more.

>Windows7

Are you serious? It is a total sack of bloated vomit (if have to suffer its suppurating pestilence on a daily basis)

>.NET and Developer Tools

Some of the GDI is nice, some integrations are good, debugging is great and, in general, VisualStudio is faster than Eclipse. But that's it. The languages are not cross-platform and TFS is a bucket of diseased sputum.

>Office products

Ah, I see. This is "humour" isn't it? Office is a raging pile of foetid balls, 2007 and 2010 even more so. Inconsistent APIs, inconsistent windowing behaviour, poorly documented (and inconsistent) file formats, lack of standards support, bloated and slow.

Posted Thursday 11th November 2010 13:09 GMT

Jess