bada beats Windows Phone in Q4 sales, but WP still making huge gains

Anyway, we actually gave you this story a couple days ago from the perspective of Apple's huge sales, which still is a pretty impressive story. But, we wanted to revisit the numbers because Gartner has explained some of the numbers a bit more, and it looks more like Windows Phone had a pretty impressive year. At first glance, it looks like the numbers show pretty clearly that Windows Phone numbers declined year-on-year, but that isn't quite right. The Q4 2010 numbers are mostly Windows Mobile sales, where Windows Phone had only about 500,000 of the 3.42 million sales listed for Microsoft in Gartner's chart.

Gartner has said that it doesn't believe that Microsoft has sold any Windows Mobile devices since Q1 of 2011, meaning that the numbers for Q4 2011 (2.76 million units sold) include only Windows Phone devices. This is a five-fold increase in sales for Microsoft, or a year-on-year increase in Q4 sales of about 452%. Additionally, Windows Phone sales increased 62% over Q3 2011, which saw about 1.7 million units sold for Microsoft. Those are some very impressive numbers for Windows Phone and the gains don't include too much of Nokia's move to Windows Phone, because the Lumia is still in the middle of its worldwide rollout. 

So, it would seem that bada's celebration party won't be lasting too long, as it is pretty likely that Windows Phone will overtake it soon enough if it hasn't happened yet. Sorry, Peter. We kept it bada-positive for as long as we could. 

source: Gartner via WMPU