4 Million Nokia N8’s sold says Bloomberg: Symbian^3 on track for 50 million?

The 12MP Symbian Flagship, has apparently reached 4 million sales. I don’t know how accurate these figures are. The last time Nokia numbers were publicised, they were wrong (N900 selling only 100,000 when that was the figure in a few weeks – a geek “niche” device for tinkering, not for the masses which Nokia claims the N9 should be).

Anyway, from BloomBerg:

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) — Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, may have delivered as many as 4 million of its N8 smartphones this quarter, Helsinki-based equity research company Inderes Oy said on its website today.

Inderes cited guidance given by chip makers, N8 search volumes on Internet search engines, additional recruitment at Nokia’s Finnish factory in Salo and media attention to the phone.

. What do you think of 4 million? I think that’s pretty decent response about a new Symbian handset.

Although we’ve heard about the N8 since early Jan of this year and officially late April, the N8 has only really been on sale from Mid October and much later for many areas, some waiting as late as November and January for N8 to come to their shores.

I’m liking what Nokia’s done on the marketing side – friends that are often clueless about phones recognize the N8, especially the jazzy colours it comes in. We need more like this in 2011! Recognition of your products Nokia. Folks will only consider what they hear about. Let them listen to something other than the blasted BlackBerry, Android or of course, iPhone.

50 Million Goal Post:

Ex Nokia CEO, OPK said that in the coming years there will be more than 50 million S^3 handsets shipped (not including other Symbian devices). The N8 of course is just ONE of the FIVE publicly known Symbian^3 handsets, which also include the C7, C6-01, upcoming E7 and the leaked X7.

That looks to be very much a modest prediction, although you could technically say it won’t happen because ^n moniker is dead. Having said that, it is confusing as Official Nokia websites still differentiate by using ^3.

A huge sigh of relief for many Symbian^3 users is that you WILL get the “Symbian^4” update. At least by means of gradual, feature by feature addition as opposed to a single OS update. This means slightly more longevity for your device.

I’d hope to hear official sales figures from Nokia. This might appear in the Q4 report which should be much better than the still profit generating Q2 an Q3 which LACKED a new flagship. Worth remembering is that Nokia still held strongly despite tough competition, even growing in smartphone market share. Fingers crossed the wait for MeeGo and the new Symbian UI isn’t too painfully distant.

Bloomberg (via @mikorjala and Rant :p)

Tags: featured, N8, Nokia, Symbian

Category: Nokia, Nseries, Symbian