Nokia insider laughs at Apple's iPhone sales claims

Apple recently released a press release stating that the company sold a million iPhone 3G S phones in three days after the launch. Given the real market size of Apple and Palm [who only sold 100,000 units in the first week - thanks to a short-sighted decision to sign an exclusivity deal with Sprint Nextel instead of Verizon], we wondered what would a reaction of market leader be.

The answer was, long story short - nothing. Nokia does things "the Finn way", no bombastic press releases or various claims. In our chat with an employee from Nokia's Ovi division, we learned that not all people in the company are thrilled with the way company works. "We sell 1.26 million phones DAILY, out of which 410,000 are smartphones". That was a reaction from an unnamed Nokia employee from the Ovi division.

The figures that cite the market strength of Nokia are something to think about. Every day, Nokia will sell 1.26 million phones. Out of that number, 410,000 can be considered smartphones, e.g. competitors to Apple's iPhone and Palm Pre. We have to rain a bit on Nokia's parade there - a minority of those 410,000 use touch-screen, so there is somewhat of a moot point there.

But Nokia as a hardware platform is a terrifying prospect for the competition. With this new cooperation with Intel, Nokia is going to bring Symbian OS into the x86 world territory, not becoming a competition to media-beloved competitors [Apple, Palm] and the real ones [Samsung, RIM], but rather a giant monster - a true cellzilla or phonezilla.

Intel could sell at least 100 million of its SoC to Nokia every year after their platform is deployed onwards [our estimate is 2010-2011], and given the aggressive plans Nokia has, in roughly 5 years from now, it could happen that SoC chips for Nokia make up for most of Intel's chip volume, something unthinkable just yet. What happens in a few hours with a live conference from 8:30AM PDT onwards will mark not just today, but rather be one of game changing days for the industry as whole.