Despite the fact that Easter and Passover holiday may not be the best time to launch a new product, Amazon. com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) reports that the Lumia 900 from Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) led sales in smartphones sold as part of a service contract. The Lumia 900 from AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) came in first and third (black and cobalt blue bezels, respectively), with various phones using the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) filling out the rest of the top ten.
No vendor sells the iPhone 4S from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) with a contract on Amazon, and the $499 price tag does not compare favorably with the Lumia 900’s $50 sticker price. Nokia/Microsoft’s other problem with the Sunday launch is that many of AT&T’s and Microsoft’s bricks-and-mortar stores were closed for the holiday.
One way to look at Lumia sales is that Nokia/Microsoft started from so far down that anything looks like up (and, in fact, is up). Another way to look at the sales is that the low-priced phone ($100 list, with yesterday’s $50 special from AT&T) could be shooting for a toehold in the low-end of the market for smartphones. If Nokia/Microsoft can actually make money on a $100 sales price, that will put a lot of pressure on the Android smartphone makers.
Paul Ausick
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