A look back at our 2012 Windows Phone Predictions

It is of course a slow news day, which makes it a perfect time to look back on the past and see if our predictions from Jan 1 2012 were accurate.

We predicted more handsets would be announced throughout the year rather than only once per year, and more geographically targeted handsets.

In some ways with the slow roll-out of the Nokia Lumia 900 and the Nokia Lumia 610 this did come true, but I would I would have expected more activity from the other OEMs, and also Nokia moved very slowly with their Tango handsets, only really releasing them in Q3 2012 rather than early in Q2.

We predicted Microsoft would announce high end Xbox Live games at E3, and support for the Unity game engine.

As we know, the first part did not really come true. Support for the Unity Game Engine was however announced in August 2012, which means I guess we will see these high end games at E3 next year.

We predicted Nokia would release an N8-equivalent camera phone in July. This was in line with our idea that Nokia would release devices throughout the year rather than in batches. It turns out we had to wait till November for the Nokia Lumia 920.

We predicted Nokia’s new Windows Phone 8 range would leak in September, and we were nearly right – it happened on the 31st August.

We accurately predicted the new Windows Phone 8 range would only reach US in November, thought this did cause a lot of angst this year, despite this being the normal pattern.  We did however expect the handsets to reach Europe a month earlier, which it did not.

We predicted 100,000 apps by June, which turned out to be accurate and 10 million Windows Phone users by Q2 2012, which I think was also accurate, though we will never really know due to Microsoft’s reluctance to release numbers.

We predicted Windows Phone would take over RIM’s mind-share, and I think that was quite accurate, and we predicted the OS would have 5% market share by the end of the year. We will have to wait till next year to see what the analysts say, but I suspect it will be closer to 3.5%.

Interestingly, looking back at the year, which had its fair share of drama, I don’t think anything really happened which we did not anticipate (except the world ending of course).  While I think many things could have been done better by Microsoft and their partners (higher frequency of handset releases, more updates, upgrades to Windows Phone 8 etc) I think we are now somewhat used to Microsoft’s slow and steady approach to Windows Phone. Our next set of predictions for 2013 in 2 days time will one again reflect that.

How do our readers think we did? Let us know below.