Nokia launched 12 Lumia devices this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, fleshing out its line, offering smartphones down the line at every price point and packaging some high-end features on more affordable phones.
Sadly for Nokia fans, it did not add another high-end smartphone to its collection. The Lumia 920, which launched in November, was the best-selling Nokia phone at 4.4 million units sold in the most recent quarter.
Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, has said that Nokia is very deliberate about Lumia supplies, which should mitigate oversupply issues but could create shortages in high-demand phones such as the 920. Nokia's investment to mid- and low-range devices is also showing major growth, says data from AdDuplex, which tracked 215 Windows Phone apps. The most popular phones running Windows worldwide were the Lumias 710, 800 and 610. The recently-launched 720 and 520 make Nokia phones even more affordable, but it won't crack the market without a great high-end selection.
With Apple and Samsung in the top spots, Nokia and Blackberry seem destined to duke it out for third place — prospects look good for Windows Phone, The Verge says, as Blackberry has been steadily declining with the rise of the smartphone while Windows Phone has nearly doubled its market share.
And its lineup for 2013? Rumors abound that aside from the Lumia (codename) EOS with a PureView camera that will debut with AT&T, Nokia also has a 928 in the works, which for now goes by Laser and is supposedly exclusive for Verizon. An aluminum-bodied Nokia Catwalk for T-mobile will also make Nokia's selection more desirable for consumers, as T-Mobile and Verizon have only carried mid-range Lumia phones. Sprint has not yet launched a device that runs Windows Phone 8 and is conspicuously absent from the Nokia lineup, but later this year it will release Windows Phone 8 handsets from HTC and Samsung.
The Windows Phone app store still lags behind Android and Apple, but in order to entice developers, it needs a better market share. Nokia and Microsoft are in a shaky position, and several smaller tweaks still need to be made to the Windows Phone OS before it can use Nokia's hardware to its fullest potential — but once it does, we expect to see Nokia and Windows Phone become almost competitive.
