New Kantar Worldpanel data from Tuesday has shown Windows Phone overtaking Symbian in the UK. Although both were now small, Windows Phone was up to 2.5 percent of the British cellphones sold in the three months leading up to mid-February where Symbian had dropped to 2.4 percent. Much of that could be credited to the Nokia Lumia 800, which in Europe made up 87 percent of all Windows Phone sales.
Android and iPhone devices were still safely in the lead, although their respective shares weren’t given out.
The results were “encouraging” to Kantar analyst Dominic Sunnebo but still left Nokia in particular racing to stay afloat. It needed to grow quickly to catch devices launching in the spring, most of which were Android devices like the HTC One series.
Windows Phone’s performance still showed that most customers dropping Symbian were leaving Nokia for other platforms rather than staying loyal. Symbian’s share was more than a fivefold drop from 12.4 percent a year earlier and part of a long downward trend. Nokia had once been the dominant cellphone provider in Europe,
