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

Not a promising start?

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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