from Hacker News

Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter

by azharcs on 1/27/11, 1:34 PM with 47 comments

• by larsberg on 1/27/11, 2:32 PM

  I moved from my iPhone (which finally bit the dust) to the LG Quantum. The nice things:

  - Zune Pass. It's like Netflix for music, but you can carry your queue around with you even if you're off-signal.

  - I stayed with AT&T, and have significantly fewer dropped calls and better signal quality than on my last phone.

  - A single start screen with all the apps, auto-updating so you can see weather and other info without having to launch the app is really fantastic.

  - No iTunes. The phone can just sync over WiFi, and there's no weird tethering-to-one-machine garbage.

  - The keyboard! It's got two modifier keys (shift and FN), and the keys are large enough that I can type pretty quickly. I need to port a mini-emacs and a terminal window ASAP. It's that usable.

  The not-good:

  - The App Market really isn't there. And where there are similar apps, the ports smell of outsourced development, as many of them (Yelp and Kindle, I'm looking at you!) crash and/or just don't have a very smooth feel.

  - Location services seems to have a lot of trouble figuring out where I am to anything smaller than a zip code.

  - I'm not on Facebook or XBox Live, so I feel like some of the social integration is a bunch of work they did that I just miss out on. Fortunately, I could just remove those apps from the front screen.

  - Trying to browse the Metro UI media app is a real pain. If I'm listening to a song, do I use the back button or swipe in a direction? Well, it depends on how I got to the Now Playing screen, and there are a few cases where I've been just stuck and had to close and re-open the app so that navigation would reset and I could get back to a artists list.

• by terhechte on 1/27/11, 2:38 PM

  It's easy to calculate. They claimed to have shipped 1.5Mio to carriers on the 21th of December. Now they claim it's 2 Mio. I'd expect that the carriers only order new phones after the old ones have been sold, so one can wager that the carriers sold around 500.000 phones since december the 21th.

  So that's around 500.000 / 37. That makes it around 13.000 activations a day.

  So given that the device was introduced beginning of November, it has been on the market for 2month and a couple of days. So then we have 13.000 * 85days = around 1.1 mio devices sold. The rest is waiting on shelves for eager customers. Doesn't sound too good.

• by sadiq on 1/27/11, 2:22 PM

  It seems that this is licenses sold rather than activations.

  I'd be interested in knowing their total activations for the quarter though it's certainly lower.

  Doesn't compare well with the 300,000 activations/day Google claim to be doing.

• by seshagiric on 1/27/11, 4:33 PM

  My own like/ dislike list:

  Likes: 1. Games - need for speed and others are very cool. 2. facebook integration just works. When reading an email it is nice to see the sender's photo (pulled from FB if he is in FB friend's list). 3. Amazon Kindle reader - the list of free books helps. 4. Voice search in Bing (needs no training) 5. Tiles for different apps looks cool and easy to use. 6. Boots up in less than 30 seconds. 7. Zune manages podcasts quite good - this is a good way to use the office transit time 8. Market place is actually decent.

  Dislike: 1. No serious API yet, for example no access to camera or compass. 2. battery life on HTC Mozart is 1 day after fairly good amount of talk time + wifi + GPS + gaming. This is actually not a problem because it runs for atleast one day - but it could have been better.

• by xutopia on 1/27/11, 4:22 PM

  Both people I know who got one recently bought it because it came with a free XBox 360 as part of the plan. In both cases it was their first "smartphone" and one of them explained how confused he was by the whole thing.

• by hop on 1/27/11, 3:14 PM

  At $8-$15 per license they are charging, thats $16-$30M. They still have some ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin. Does not seem like this can ever be a profitable business for them - especially compared to the $149-$499 they get per Office license.

• by cdr on 1/27/11, 3:52 PM

  I wonder if that number includes giveaways? I recall they gave away approx 100K phones to Microsoft employees alone.

• by ReadyNSet on 1/27/11, 4:52 PM

  I've one :) got because of BOGO deal. Samsung Focus's screen is awesome the SuperAMOLED really shows anyone who sees it really likes the screen and that includes iPhone and Nexus owners and others.

  Marketplace really is not there, the apps are junk and even the marketplace app itself is slow to load on cellular connections and it really shows. the search is pathetic it seems they intentionally show you the songs along with apps even if all I want is apps

  MS needs to update the OS and they need to do it fast and frequently otherwise in next six months to year they'll be out of this game forever

• by nigelsampson on 1/27/11, 7:32 PM

  I have the HTC Trophy from Vodafone here in New Zealand, I really enjoy the UI, for some reason it really clicks with me compared some the other smartphones.

  As a developer my biggest gripe is the limited access to some of the phone features, the largest one being the limited API for Live Tiles which clearly is one of the major selling points for the WP7.

• by misterbwong on 1/27/11, 8:25 PM

  Good for them.

  Yes, we can speculate on whether this is marketing FUD or real numbers but the bottom line is that MS made a good product that is helping to innovate the mobile space by increasing competition.

• by bowmande on 1/27/11, 7:10 PM

  Microsoft can't build the kind of developer community that Google and Apple have. The interface is smooth, and the Zune Pass is great, but there has to be more.

• by warmfuzzykitten on 1/27/11, 11:21 PM

  Wow, that's a big warehouse full!