Nokia already dominating Windows Phone market share

Nokia’s range of Lumia Windows Phones has only been on sale for a few months, but new data appear to show that they’ve already established a dominant position within the ecosystem, charging past other manufacturers that have been selling Windows Phone devices since day one.

The Next Web used data made available by Occasional Gamer, developer of popular titles such as Impossible Shooter and NomNom Worm, and which has seen over one million app installations on the Windows Phone platform. Using that data, they were able to establish an approximation of market share among second-generation Windows Phones (those developed for and sold with the 7.5 ‘Mango’ update on board):

- Nokia: 45%
- HTC: 40%
- Samsung: 12%
- Fujitsu: 3%

Remember, those figures relate solely to second-generation devices. When you look at hardware sales and market share for all Windows Phone devices since the first handsets went on sale in Q4 2010, things look a bit different (also based on Occasional Gamer data):

- HTC: 55%
- Samsung: 28%
- LG: 12%
- Nokia: 4%
- Others: 1%

Evidently, Nokia’s share of sales is relatively small when compared with the likes of HTC and Samsung over the last 15 months, but that’s to be expected. Nokia’s Lumia 800 was its only Windows Phone on sale for several weeks, with the 710 having gone on sale much later; both devices have only been available in a handful of markets, and the recently announced Lumia 900 won’t be available to purchase for another couple of months.

Nokia's Lumia Momentum Map. Today, the Windows Phone ecosystem; tomorrow, the world.

In this context, it’s rather remarkable that Nokia has been able to make such an impact in a relatively short space of time, leapfrogging its rivals to become the top-selling manufacturer in the Windows Phone ecosystem.

The question now is that of whether rival manufacturers will up their game in order to more effectively compete against Nokia, or if they'll simply give up the Windows Phone fight to focus on devices built with other operating systems, such as Android, Bada or even BlackBerry OS, given recent suggestions that RIM will consider licensing it to other manufacturers.