Windows Phone 7 has got off to a sluggish start as far as our customers are concerned, accounting for just 3% of smartphone sales and a little under 2% of overall sales through MobilesPlease.co.uk and our network of mobile phone partner sites.
The 800,000 people who visit these mobile channels a month are enough to show that the initial public reaction to Windows Phone 7 is luke warm at best.
Symbian 3 handsets outsold Windows 7 Phones by 3 to 1, which is sure to be a blow to Microsoft if our figures are representative of the market as a whole, particularly as the Symbian 3 sales were almost entirely made up of one handset, the Nokia N8.
With Windows Phone 7 Microsoft have genuinely made an effort to differentiate, however they have arrived very late to the market and catching up with the other players will be a Herculean task.
I wanted to make sure that our figures weren’t anomalous, so I went to a few local high street mobile phone retailers, both network owned and independent and although they couldn’t give me numbers the story was the same, Windows Phone 7 Handsets are not selling. The retailers I spoke to said that demand for iPhone, Blackberry and HTC handsets was strong in the smartphone sector. Perhaps surprisingly, our local Carphone Warehouse did not have any Windows Phone 7 handsets on display, and when I asked they said that they “might have one in the back”. I’m sure this isn’t indicative of all retailers’ position on Windows Phone 7 but it’s still interesting.
The windows phone 7 handsets -as nice as they are – are by and large generic phones from well known manufacturers, and in most cases an almost identical model is available from the same manufacturer with Android, and given the choice people seem to be picking Android.
With no killer handsets, and the stuffy, suit and tie image that they have tried so hard to shed still lingering, Microsoft need to pull something impressive out of the bag soon if they are going to compete in the mobile phone market.
Note to Editors
If you want the full figures, please email ben.pusey[at]justsayplease.co.uk
These are the first really solid figures for Windows Phone 7, as Microsoft never releases sales figures for languishing platforms.
Microsoft released figures for the older Windows Mobile when it did well in past years, but stopped releasing figures when Windows Mobile’s share began to plummet (it’s now at 2.8%, according to Gartner). Microsoft never released sales figures for its failed Kin phones.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the latest sales numbers from MobilesPlease heralds bad news. Windows Phone 7 has crashed and burned, with only around 1.9% of sales. Considering fans and early adopters usually dominate first-month sales, we can expect this figure to drop even lower in the coming months.
These figures corroborate the estimates by The Street of lackluster Windows Phone 7 sales.
In May, Steve Ballmer boasted that Microsoft would sell at least 30 million handsets. AT&T said it would order 8 million of these. Now AT&T is holding a fire sale to get rid of unwanted Windows Phone 7 handsets, and giving them away in 2-for-1 deals.
The extreme discounts being offered for Windows Phone 7 handsets is unheard of for brand new models, and puts it in a similar situation as Kin, which was also heavily discounted a couple of weeks after launch.
It’s the ‘zune’ all over again.
Micros**t trots out a brown and smelly ‘me too’ product to answer Apple and the market yawns.
Of course some people will buy it, but then people bought the Fiat Multipla too.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you have a horribly skewed sample. I suspect that any group of people who purchase their phones through a website that specializes in mobile phones is almost certain to skew toward Android.
Why is there no information regarding the deviation from established global numbers for the other phones?
Is this really a fair comparison to make? Why don’t we give WP7 a little bit more time to settle in the market and in people’s minds BEFORE we come up with these types of comparisons?
Microsoft Windows mobile is THE WORSE device I have EVER used!
Crashes constantly and have to pull battery out more than ten times a day! grrrrrr
EVERYONE I ask who owns an HTC HD2 HATES them.
Contrary for EVO owners (SPRINT DROID version) LOVE them.
Trying to Jailbreak mine and put android on there.
NEVER will I buy a windows based ANYTHING if I can help it!
Thx for letting me vent.
Go Google!
Disclaimer: I don’t own/work/invest in any of those cos. i.e google/MS/Apple/ HTC,etc…
Is Microsoft-bashing a sure fire way to generate page views? I don’t understand the automatic contempt for one of the world’s most important technology companies and seemingly every single one of their endeavors.
By most accounts, WP7 represents an innovative new approach that is arguably targeted at people that don’t frequent sites like this one. You know, normal people. And you obviously cannot discount Microsoft’s presence in the corporate sector, which may help them cross-over to that space; a transition the iPhone has struggled with so far.
It is obviously way too soon, and frankly, a little ridiculous, to call time-of-death on WP7. You can bet that Microsoft understands the steep climb ahead of them and is in it for the long haul.
Slow sales, I don’t think so. Please consider the fact that it is a new technology. If you really want to compare lets use this
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.svg
Since Apple sold only 270,000 in the first quater of release. I would say Microsoft is sitting pretty at 140,000.