Windows Phone gaining traction with Nokia?

We’ve had a bit of negative press about Windows Phone 7 after the launch of the new Nokia Lumia 800 this month.

Analyst firm Pacific Crest lowered its estimation of shipments of the handset from 2 million this quarter to 1 million, guessing that around half of those would be sold to consumers.

Not figures which set the world alight, but WM Poweruser has also been monitoring the Windows Phone 7 situation, and reckons there’s cause for cautious optimism.

Sales have spiked this month, coinciding with the launch of the Lumia 800, and of course other new Mango toting handsets from Samsung and HTC who are dabbling with Microsoft’s OS as well as Android.

WM Poweruser draws its estimations from the amount of people recorded using the integrated Facebook on Windows Phone 7 handsets. This, the site claims, is a reliable measure of the number of phone owners out there, which it reckons is currently around 5 million WP7 fans.

The latest Facebook data shows a distinct spike upwards over the last month, which the site reckons represents around 600,000 new WP7 owners.

That’s as many as Pacific Crest were anticipating the OS to put on by the end of the year, and should it be accurate, Windows Phone 7 is moving some reasonable quantities. Still nothing like the scale of Android, of course, but that can hardly be expected.

We’ll find out some hard numbers soon enough, no doubt, and if Microsoft continues to keep quiet about Windows Phone 7 sales – as it has done thus far – we’ll know something is amiss.