Nokia Lumia 800 is struggling?

Nokia’s new Windows Phone 7 handset, the Lumia 800, has now been on sale for a week.

And great things are expected from the first Mango-based Nokia WP7 offering, with a big advertising campaign backing it up.

Thus far, Microsoft’s new mobile OS has struggled to make any impact on the market whatsoever in its first year. And Nokia’s smartphone share has slid hugely, with Symbian being abandoned as an outdated platform.

Both companies need the Lumia 800, the lead WP7 phone, to be a success, and with early reviews making largely positive noises, analysts have been talking up the Microsoft-Nokia partnership as a possible corner turned.

Until now, that is, with one analyst firm looking at early developments today and starting to make some more negative predictions.

These sprung up in an article published by the Guardian. The paper spoke to James Faucette, an analyst at Pacific Crest.

He told them: “We believe that shipments of Nokia’s new Windows Phone 7 have been lower than we had previously anticipated.”

“We had expected that the company could ship as many as 2m units into the six targeted markets for the holidays; however, we now believe that those shipments are likely to be less than 1m for the quarter.”

Faucette thinks that the number of phones actually sold to customers could be as little as half a million by the end of the year.

To put that in perspective, the iPhone 4S sold four million over its opening weekend, and Samsung’s Galaxy S II managed to shift around two million per month this year.

Windows Phone 7 could never be expected to suddenly keep pace with these sort of figures, of course, and these early estimates aren’t disastrous. Also, this analyst may not be right with his guesswork either.

But the news certainly won’t be welcome at the offices of Nokia and Microsoft.

So, assuming this chap is on the money, why might the Lumia 800 not sell as well as expected? Windows Phone 7 market share has been so poor over the past year that a recovery was always going to be a big uphill struggle.

Some analysts also feel the handset is rather over priced. Yes, the hardware on board is tasty, but to make an impact against the might of Android and the iPhone, a slightly more budget oriented pricing may have helped spark sales to a greater degree.

That’s how Amazon hopes to take on the iPad with the Kindle Fire – although the smartphone market is a tougher nut to crack still. Maybe we’ll see some form of price drop before Christmas, although that’s probably unlikely, as it might be too dangerous to appear to be admitting defeat this early on.