Nokia Promises New Flagship Lumia Soon, Amid Modest Growth

Just like Microsoft, Nokia also disclosed its sales results for the first quarter of the year. And while shipments of Lumia smartphones witnessed a slight increase, total sales of smartphones saw a drop.

And now, in a bid to keep on with the winning ways, Nokia’s CEO has promised to launch a new flagship Lumia smartphone before this quarter is out.

Over the past few months the Finnish telecommunication titan had introduced a wide range of devices powered by Windows Phone 8, targeting different market segments and price points. This led to a volume increase of 27 percent on a quarter-to-quarter basis for Q1 2013. Not bad.

Around 5.6 million Lumia smartphones were sold the past quarter — a sign of increasing momentum.

But sales of the company’s Symbian based smartphones collapsed to a mere 500 thousand this quarter, a clear indication that the platform is nearly dead. Factoring this in, the company announced a refresh of the Lumia lineup along with a new flagship model.

Stephen Elop said in the conference call:

“Later this quarter, a new Lumia device is anticipated to have hero status with a leading U.S. operator, and event which will mark the beginning of a season of new product introductions.”

Overall, the total number of smartphone sales for the quarter came in at 6.1 million units — a decline from 6.6 million units a quarter before, and 10.2 million units a year ago.

But all thanks to Nokia joining the Microsoft camp, the average price of a Nokia smartphone increased to a lucrative $191. This is a marked upturn from the averages of $143 per unit a year back, and $183 in the last quarter of 2012. Elop continued:

“Nokia, Microsoft and operators have committed to increase the global Windows Phone marketing dollars towards Lumia. Together with Microsoft we are working on major marketing campaigns, training more retail associates, improving how we leverage operator marketing that is available to us, and seeding more live devices to create a more engaging point of sale experience. Overall, we are very pleased with our progress around Lumia.”

Anyway, while there are no specifics on what the new flagship Lumia device will be launched by Nokia, this much can be said with reasonable certainty that it probably will not feature a quad-core CPU of full-HD display due to the inherent limitations of Windows Phone 8.

These are limitations that Microsoft will only take care of when it updates the platform in late 2013.