Microsoft Lumia

History

From 1998 to 2012, Nokia was the largest vendor of mobile phones in the world, which included early smartphones built on its Symbian platform. However, in recent years, its market share declined as a result of the growing use of touchscreen smartphones from other vendors, such as Apple's iPhone line and Android-based products. In 2010, its market share had declined to 28%, and in April 2012, Samsung Electronics (a prominent user of Android) ultimately overtook Nokia as the largest mobile phone vendor in the world. Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop vetoed the idea of producing Android devices, believing the company wouldn't be able to suitably differentiate its Android products from that of other vendors. In an employee memo, Elop infamously described the company as being on a "burning platform", blaming the "war of ecosystems" between iOS and Android as part of Nokia's overall struggle, and asserting that the company needed to make major changes to its operation.

Partnership between Microsoft and Nokia

In February 2011, Stephen Elop and Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer jointly announced a major business partnership between Nokia and Microsoft, which would see Nokia adopt Windows Phone as its primary platform on future smartphones, replacing both Symbian and MeeGo. The deal also included the integration of Bing as the search engine on Nokia devices, and the integration of Nokia Maps into Microsoft's own mapping services. Nokia had planned to use the MeeGo platform as part of its future plans prior to the announcement, although the company announced that it would still release one MeeGo device in 2011. Aligning with Microsoft had been considered a possibility by analysts due to Elop's prior employment with the company.

Nokia unveiled its first Windows Phone 7-based devices, the mid-range Lumia 710 and high-end Lumia 800, on 26 October 2011 at its Nokia World conference. Motivated by requests from the U.S. carrier AT&T for an LTE-enabled device, Nokia quickly developed the Lumia 900 as a follow-up, first unveiled at the 2012 International CES. The Lumia 900 received heavy promotion by the carrier as a flagship device, but its launch was dampened by a software bug that prevented the device from connecting to certain mobile data networks, forcing AT&T to issue credits to those who purchased the device. Upon its launch in April 2012, the Lumia 900 was listed as a top seller on Amazon.com, but online sales began to taper off by May. While not revealing further details, a Nokia representative stated that the company was "pleased with the consumer reaction, as well as the support we have received from AT&T", while AT&T's mobility chief Ralph de la Vega stated that the Lumia 900 had "exceeded expectations".

In early 2012, Nokia released the Lumia 610, a new entry-level device taking advantage of the lower system requirements introduced by Windows Phone 7's "Tango" update. These new low-end devices were intended to improve Windows Phone adoption in emerging markets such as China.

Later in September 2012, Nokia unveiled the Lumia 820 and the Lumia 920, its first two devices to use the second generation of the Windows Phone platform, Windows Phone 8. Both featured NFC, with the Lumia 820 embedding a microSD card slot, and an optional Wireless Charging Shell for Qi wireless charging. The Lumia 920 also notably featured Qi wireless charging, and a "PureView" camera with optical image stabilization. While Nokia received criticism when it was revealed that a demonstration video of its image stabilization technology was in fact, filmed using a professional camera, the Lumia 920 was a commercial success for the company.

Then at MWC 2013, Nokia introduced two more Windows Phone 8 devices, the mid- range Nokia Lumia 720 & the budget Nokia Lumia 520, of which the latter has become the most sold Windows phone device ever.

In 2013, Nokia also introduced the Lumia 925, a revised version of the 920 with a slimmer build incorporating aluminium, and the Lumia 1020, which features a 41-megapixel camera based on technology from its Symbian-based 808 PureView.

On 22 October 2013, Nokia extended the Lumia brand into the tablet market with the unveiling of the Lumia 2520; running Microsoft's Windows RT operating system, it was the company's first tablet since the Nokia Internet tablet range. Some critics believed that the usage of Windows RT opposed to full Microsoft Windows 8.1 led to bad sales as most major Windows tablet makers have used Windows 8.1 in favour of Windows RT. though others have claimed that the device's heavy weight and high price caused it to fail. Lumia 2520 was discontinued in early 2015.

Although sales of the Lumia line had exceeded those of BlackBerry in the same period, Nokia still made an operating loss of €115m (m), with revenues falling 24% to €5.7bn following the second quarter of 2013. Over the past nine quarters, Nokia sustained €4.1 billion worth of operating losses.

Acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone business

On 3 September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Nokia's mobile phone business (including rights to the Lumia and low-end Asha brands) in an overall deal totaling at over US$7 bn. Stephen Elop stepped down as Nokia's CEO and re-join Microsoft as its head of devices as part of the deal, which closed in early 2014. While Microsoft will license the Nokia name under a 10-year agreement, the company will only be able to use it on feature phones specifically phones running the Series 30, Series 30+ and the Series 40 mobile operating systems based on Java ME and MediaTek technology, respectively. These changes resulted in future Lumia models being first-party hardware produced by Microsoft.

Android prototypes

On 13 September 2013, the New York Times writer Nick Wingfield revealed that Nokia had been testing the Android operating system on its Lumia hardware. It was one of two known Android projects at the company; the other was running the OS on low–end Asha hardware, which resulted in the Nokia X family of devices. Despite the testing the Android-based Lumia handsets were never released and only altered Asha devices were brought to the market.

In July 2014 Microsoft announced that they would discontinue all Nokia Asha and X Devices in favour of Lumia Devices. All future Nokia Asha and X designs will be used in future Lumia Designs.

Under Microsoft ownership

Even after the acquisition of Nokia's mobile device business by Microsoft, several Lumia devices were unveiled by Microsoft Mobile in September 2014 that still carried the Nokia name, including the Lumia 830 and Lumia 735; In July 2014, it had been reported by evleaks that Microsoft was attempting to license the Nokia name in a co-branding scheme, which would have possibly seen future devices branded as "Nokia by Microsoft". As a part of the change of ownership the social network pages have also been rebranded as Microsoft Lumia rather than Microsoft Mobile to emphasize their focus on Windows Phone as opposed to other Nokia mobile phones while also changing their social network pages of Windows Phone to the new Microsoft Lumia branding, to reflect this change Nokia Conversations has also been rebranded as Lumia Conversations, and NokNok.tv to Lumia Conversations UK. Though the rebranding has not been consistent as the Nokia Army has been renamed the Spartan Nation and the support site for legacy phones, accessories, as well as other Nokia-branded devices and services Nokia Discussions has been renamed the Microsoft Mobile Community. The Lumia Beamer was the last Lumia branded application to have its URL changed from Nokia to Lumia signifying the end of the term Microsoft was allowed to use Nokia.com and related sites during this transitional period.

However, in October 2014, Microsoft officially announced that it would phase out the Nokia brand in its promotion and production of Lumia smartphones, and that future Lumia models will be branded solely with the name and logo of Microsoft. In November 2014, Microsoft announced its first self branded phone, Microsoft Lumia 535. Rebranding the Lumia line from "Nokia" to "Microsoft" did not affect sales though some critics believed that the change of branding might influence consumers' decisions due to the established brand of Nokia which has built up a reputation of durability while the Microsoft brand is relatively new in the consumer phone space. The Nokia Lumia 638 was the last Lumia to bear the Nokia brand and was only released in India in December 2014.

In November 2014, a post by a Microsoft Twitter account stated that all Nokia and Microsoft Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 would receive updates to Windows 10, but following the official unveiling, Microsoft reiterated and stated that they were targeting the "majority" of Lumia phones, and that not all phones would receive the update or support all of its features. Later, Microsoft confirmed that low end devices with 512MB of RAM (including the Nokia Lumia 520—a model which represents 24.5% of all Windows Phone devices sold), would also get the Windows 10 upgrade, but reaffirmed that not all of its features would be supported on these devices. Additionally, Microsoft stated on January 16, 2015 that low end Windows Phone 8.1 phones will not get some Lumia Denim features.

In July 2015, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft had a planned restructuring of Microsoft Mobile, which includes the Microsoft Lumia range. This will reportedly include a write down of about $7.6 billion on the acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone business and a layoff of about 7200 employees. Also reported was that Microsoft will release fewer first-party devices every year.

As part of a larger restructuring the Microsoft Devices & Studios engineering Group was merged with the Operating Systems Engineering Group to form the larger Windows & Devices Engineering Group, and in July 2015 it was announced that the head of Surface, Panos Panay would head the new "Microsoft devices" unit which includes the Microsoft Lumia as well as various other Microsoft hardware products such as the Band, HoloLens, and Xbox.

In October 2015, Microsoft launched the first Lumia devices running on Windows 10 Mobile, the Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL and Lumia 550. In February 2016, Lumia 650, which also runs Windows 10 Mobile, was launched.

Lumia updates

Nokia and Microsoft Mobile have released several updates unique to Lumia devices, the releases contain a combination of firmware and software updates which include imaging improvements, new technology support, as well as feature updates and bug fixes. Because Lumia devices exclusively use Windows Phone, major operating system updates are often bundled with the firmware updates upon release.

Similar to how Windows Phones receive operating system updates, Lumia update releases are dependent on carriers who decide if and when devices are to receive them. However, operating system updates are not subject to these constraints if users are part of Microsoft's Windows Insider or Preview for Developers program.

Numbering convention

The first digit (or the first two digits, for devices with four-digit model numbers) indicates the device's family, with larger numbers generally denoting a higher-end device. Under Nokia, numbers larger than 10 indicated a phablet (e.g. 1320, 1520) or tablet (2520). Since the sale of the Lumia line to Microsoft, four-digit model numbers have been discontinued, with larger models instead being denoted by an "XL" suffix (e.g. 950 XL).

The second digit indicates the generation of the device, based on the operating system it originally shipped with:

The third digit is used to distinguish between variants in the same family and generation. 0 indicates the base model, while other numbers indicate either a minor upgrade (e.g. 920 and 925), a 4G-capable variant (e.g. 730 and 735) or a regional or carrier-specific variant.

An optional "C" or "T" suffix indicates a variant produced exclusively for the Chinese market.

Sales

Graph of quarterly global sales (million units)