Microsoft Says 50 Million Lumia Phones Have Been Activated Till Date

Microsoft at a recent blogger event held in Germany reportedly announced that till date 50 million Lumia handsets have been activated worldwide.

WMPoweruser said Microsoft also revealed there are 560,000 developers for the Windows Phone platform. The Redmond giant is reported to have added that there are now 320,000 apps in its Windows Phone Store, growing from 300,000 apps in August.

Notably, according to the updated Microsoft's 'by the Numbers' page, the Windows and Windows Phone Store combined have passed the half a million apps milestone as of September 30.

As for the 50 million activated Lumia units, it is not clear how many handsets are still in use. However, according to Adduplex (via WMPoweruser), a Windows Phone cross-promotion network, 90 percent of the Lumia handsets are still being used globally.

Last month, Microsoft reported 9.3 million Lumia smartphone sales in the first full quarter since the close of the Nokia deal. Sales of the Surface tablet also more than doubled to $908 million (roughly Rs. 5,600 crores) from $400 million (roughly Rs. 2,400 crores) in the year-ago quarter.

Microsoft earlier this month also launched the first Lumia smartphone with its own branding, called the Microsoft Lumia 535. Some key features of the handset are Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Denim update; 5-inch IPS LCD display with qHD (540x960 pixels) resolution; quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2GHz alongside 1GB of RAM; 8GB of built-in storage that is further expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB); 5-megapixel rear and front-facing camera, and 1905mAh battery to power it all.

Microsoft last month had announced that it would drop the Nokia name from its Lumia smartphones, continuing the rebranding following the acquisition of the Finnish company's handset division.