Be still my beating heart! Yes, ’tis true – Microsoft managed to ship two million Windows Phone 7 devices to cellphone carriers as of the end of December.
Of course, it remains unclear how many of the smartphones were actually offloaded to end-users last quarter.
Still, as Microsoft Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan told Mobilized, the company is currently in the “early stages” of its WP7 life cycle.
*Ahem.* Nice save there, Greg!
But like, how about some real data, namely, the number of consumers who purchased the phone?
Ah, well, you can’t have everything, right?
Nevertheless, Sullivan claimed that “when people use this phone, they really, really” like it.
“One of the key ways that we’ll measure success of Windows Phone is did we ship a phone people love,” he said.
“[And 93 percent of early customers] are satisfied or very satisfied. That’s a really great number.”
Unsurprisingly, AT&T also refused to release specific sales figures, but insisted that sales have been “steadily” growing as it mumbled the following corporate mantra: “We believe this shows Windows Phone has a bright future in an intensively competitive space.”
Hell, you gotta love AT&T. They really are diplomatic up until the bitter, bitter end.
Because as ABI analyst Kevin Burden noted, the above-mentioned shipment figure really isn’t “all that rosy.”
“The number shows there’s a lot of competition in this space and Windows Phone 7 is having a hard time being heard over the crowd,” Burden told Bloomberg.
“Can they build on this number? Yeah. But they need to show an uptick in the first quarter and an uptick on top of that in the second quarter. They have the ability to do some smart things with Windows Phone 7, but as always it comes down to execution.” [[Microsoft]]
