First proper post-holiday coffee of the year and I'm scrolling through my feeds half awake when I see Nokia's stock jumped hard yesterday. Like, double-digit percent, the kind of move that gets a company that's been left for dead a bunch of "wait, what?" headlines. Turns out they put out a preliminary heads-up on Q4 numbers before the full earnings report, and the short version is Lumia sales came in a lot better than analysts had penciled in. Asha did fine too, apparently, though nobody was worried about Asha.
I want to be clear that I don't own a Lumia. I've never owned a Windows Phone. But I've been quietly rooting for Nokia for about two years now in this specific, slightly embarrassing way where you like an underdog mostly because everyone else has already written them off. Remember the "burning platform" memo? Stephen Elop wrote that internal memo back in early 2011 comparing Nokia's situation to a guy standing on a burning oil rig who has to jump into freezing water because staying put means certain death. It leaked immediately, obviously, because internal memos always leak, and it became this whole meme about corporate doom-speak. That was the starting gun for the whole Windows Phone pivot, and for about eighteen months afterward it looked like the company had jumped off the platform and just kept falling.
So yesterday's news is the first time in a while it looks like maybe they hit water instead of concrete. Good for them, honestly.
Here's my actual opinion though, and it's not a popular one among the three friends I've argued about this with: the Lumia 920 is a genuinely nice piece of hardware wrapped around an app store that still isn't there yet. I played with one at a Best Buy back before Christmas (AT&T's had it at ninety-nine bucks on a two-year contract since November) and the build quality is real. It's heavy in a way that feels expensive rather than cheap, the PureView camera with the optical stabilization is legitimately better than what I had expected walking in, and the screen looks great even outdoors, which is more than I can say for a couple of Android phones I've used. But then you go looking for something like Instagram and it's not there, and you go looking for a half-decent podcast app and you're picking between three options that all look like they were designed in 2009. Hardware alone doesn't win this fight. It never has.
And can we talk about the exclusivity thing for a second, because it's a small complaint but it's mine. AT&T had the 920 as a US exclusive for months. I get why carriers do this, I get the economics of it, but as a customer sitting outside the AT&T ecosystem it just means the phone doesn't exist for me. Doesn't matter how good the camera is if I'd have to switch carriers and eat an early termination fee to find out. Nokia needed every single potential buyer it could get and instead a chunk of the market got told to come back later, maybe, if their carrier feels like it.
Anyway. None of that changes what happened yesterday, which is that the numbers were good enough to move the stock in a real way, and for a company that's been the subject of "is Nokia dying" thinkpieces for two straight years, one decent quarter matters more than it would for basically anyone else. Whether it's a real turnaround or a nice blip before more bad news in the spring, no idea. I've been wrong about this company in both directions before.
CES kicks off next week in Vegas, the 8th through the 11th, and I'd bet money Nokia shows up talking about this exact good news on every stage they can find a microphone near. Everyone's going to be looking at curved TVs and whatever ridiculous concept laptops get wheeled out, and Nokia's going to be quietly trying to convince the room that the comeback is real. I kind of hope it works. I'm just not buying one yet.