The real astounding (and alreay known) fact here: you are the number one Windows Phone manufacturer with an amount of devices shipped (not sold) in a quarter (!) that equals the amount other platforms (android & ios) activate (not ship) every single day.

That pretty much shows, how much Windows Phone still has to go before it catches up in retail market share (and then finally some day in active devices market share).

I like Windows Phone a lot, but I am not sure about MSs strategy; lowering hardware requirements, opens a new market, but one with low margins; it adds fragmentation and the original Windows Phone specs are de-facto already low-end today (if you look at android and ios offerings). To stay in the game, they will need to offer high-end hardware (dual- and quad-core), too – so that´s another set of hardware developers can design for and while there is no software fragmentation (as of now), there is one on the hardware side and pretty bad, because high- and low-end hardware is added to the mix at the same time (other than with ios, where iterations of hardware become more powerful with every update).

I shared my hands-on impressions of the Lumia 710 on our podcast last month and I’m looking forward to see any new WP’s come out of MWC to try. I find the UI very refreshing and easy to use, although there are still some things I don’t like: Scrolling through an endless list of alphabetized apps isn’t ideal to me, for example. But all in all, it’s a very capable platform IMO.

People whose opinions I respect seem so like it a lot (even after using Android and iOS for a while). I haven’t warmed to it yet, and its design seems to limit both UI advances and app visibility (on the phone) for perhaps the majority of app developers.