// Home / Enterprise / News

Flagship Nokia smartphone suffers sinking sales

Posted on 28 May 2010 at 09:13

Nokia has sold fewer than 100,000 models of its top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on sale, according to research firm Gartner.

The chunky handset with a slide-out keyboard and touchscreen has found support among hard-core technology specialists but failed to attract a wider audience, Gartner believes.

However a bullish Nokia executive said the company was please with the handset’s performance. "Sales have substantially exceeded expectations," said Alberto Torres, head of Nokia's solutions business.

Nokia has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Apple in the three years since the iPhone's launch. Its last hit smartphone model, the N95, was unveiled in 2006.

Sales of fewer than 100,000 N900s compares poorly to sales of 8.75 million iPhones in January-March alone.

The N900, which went on sale last November, is Nokia's first phone running the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as a key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.

In February this year, Nokia unveiled a plan to merge Maemo with Intel's Moblin operating system.

Nokia sold 50,000 N900s in the last quarter of 2009, and quarterly sales fell in January-March, Gartner statistics showed.

Subscribe to PC Pro magazine. We'll give you 3 issues for £1 plus a free gift - click here

From around the web

User comments

I am not surprised

I bought one a month ago but it wasn't easy. I went round every major network's high street shops and none of them were selling any of the Nokia N series. That includes the n97 mini (which was my second choice). I ended up having to buy mine unlocked from an independent. Without operators subsidizing it a phone this expensive will always struggle to sell. The iphone and the HTC desire are the new shiny, all the sales people wanted to sell me one of them rather than giving me what I wanted or tell why they weren't stocking it and wouldn't tell me if they would get it in. Even in the shop I bought it in I had to spend ten minutes convincing the salesman I didn't want anything else. With people on commission pushing customers to everything else to meet some target or not stocking it at all I am surprised they have sold this many.

On a side note, while I think it is fantastic it is really a computer that can make phone calls. It is far more complex than anything else I’ve used so it isn’t really for Joe Bloggs and his granny.

By JamesD29 on 28 May 2010

Ha!

Alberto Torres the 'bullish' Nokia Exec...

By danson on 28 May 2010

Order lead times are 80 days in some shops.

I wanted one of these but was given an order time of 80 days. I don't think Nokia ever expected it to be much more than a niche device and misjudged demand and therefore manufacturing capacity.

By Macer71 on 28 May 2010

Great hardware, barely alpha software

I owned an N900 for 2 weeks before returning it for a refund. The hardware is a little chunky but it had a nice screen, good sound quality and it really could handle multitasking.

What killed the product for me was the software. I don't mind doing some searching around for additional code for application extras, but this was too much. Even to get basic call forwarding to work I had to find and download code somebody else had developed. The Ovi maps was not even close to the Symbian version with no voice guidance or map download ability.

Not even Nokia's own PC desktop sync software was fully compatible.

And then to cap it all Maemo is at the end of its life and no guarantee from Nokia (that I could find) that they will support Meego on the N900.

By juliand2 on 28 May 2010