Microsoft Lumia phones are the smartphones designed, manufactured and marketed by Microsoft which was previously held by Nokia. Prior to 2012, Nokia was the leading mobile selling manufacturer in the world. It had a lion’s share of world’s total mobile phone market. However, as the world shifted from the conventional mobile systems to the uber-chic smartphone, Nokia didn’t move with the same pace and slowly it was overtaken by Samsung, apple and other technology giants in the race. However, Nokia Lumia continues to be popular in the market.

The history of Lumia goes way back to 2011 when it partnered with Microsoft to sell smartphones.

The deal was that Nokia would manufacture phones and it would be supported by an operating system Windows build by Microsoft. The deal was based on the aspect that Microsoft would use ‘Bing’ as the default search engine and ‘Nokia maps’ as its default map. That gave birth to the first Lumia smartphones in the year 2011 in October, where Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 were first revealed to the world at the Nokia conference. Both phones ran on Windows 7 platform. As the demand for the LTE devices grew in the US markets, the markets quickly opened up for and paved the way for Lumia 900 which supported LTE to enter in the year 2012.

That was the flagship device of Nokia, and it went on to become one the best-selling phones in the market. Later on, the company introduced Lumia 610 as an entry-level smartphone to target the markets like China and India.

Then the company advanced its operating system to Windows 8 and introduced Lumia 820 and Lumia 920 which sold very well in the market. Both were supported by great new features including NFC. Later on, the company also introduced Lumia 520 which became the highest selling smartphone ever. The year 2013 was pivotal for Lumia as Nokia was acquired by Microsoft in a whopping $7 billion deal.

Microsoft Lumia 535 was the first phone to hit the market with the brand name as Microsoft. It got medium response from the market. Later on, Microsoft brought a major update to Windows 10 on its smartphones. Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL and Lumia 550 were the first phones to run on Windows 10 platform. However, the sale of the Lumia phones went down as the year progressed. The phone showed a massive descending in sales from the year 2015 to 2017. This was due to the wave that rocked the market that was the phones with Android and the iOS operating systems. Lumia couldn’t move on with that pace. So, that Microsoft slowed down its sales in the last quarters of 2016, fuellng the speculation that it would stop manufacturing Lumia phones but there is no official say on that.