Nokia may be trailing Samsung in smartphone sales, but it definitely has a publicity edge this month with its on-the-street smartphone speed tests. Nokia representatives offer cash rewards to any smartphone user who can upload a video to Facebook faster than a Lumia Windows phone user. Mimicking its popular US “my phone got smoked by a Windows phone” campaign, Nokia’s “blown away by Lumia” videos from India are getting thousands of views on YouTube.
Samsung calls the videos “unethical” since most of the phones beaten are Samsung smartphones. Nokia says everyone who competed in the contests did so voluntarily, and a lot of the losers just happened to have Samsung phones. Now Nokia is taking the “blown away” campaign to China, where Samsung has an estimated 24.3% of the smartphone market and Nokia has 19.6%, according to Gartner.
Globally, Samsung could be on the brink of displacing Nokia as the world’s top seller of mobile phones. Nokia reported earlier this week that it sold 83 million phones during the first quarter. A Bloomberg analyst survey estimates that Samsung shipped 92 million phones in the first quarter, but of course not every phone shipped is actually sold.
Meanwhile in the US, Nokia is busy shipping new Lumia 900 phones to AT&T stores after the products launched last weekend turned out to have a software bug that made it hard for some users to access AT&T’s network. The company also said this week that its devices and services unit will lose money during the first half of the year, and its stock price plummeted. (chart shows Nokia stock price movement April 9 – April 13.)
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