Well this is a tricky subject to tackle. Last quarter margins were artificially inflated by component shortages that cost Nokia sales in the low end of the product spectrum. They couldn't make enough low-cost, low-margin phones to meet demand, basically, due to component shortages and this artificially inflated margins by shifting the product mix to relatively higher-end, higher-margin product.
If Nokia was able to resolve its component shortages and as a result was able to ship low-end phones to meet demand for Q4 we could see margins fall sequentially, even with improved volume in the higher-margin smartphone segment thanks to the S^3 series of devices. If they weren't able to resolve the issues, and this was implied to be the likely case during the last conference call, we could see margins that are sequentially higher than last quarter's. Maybe quite a bit higher given the new phones.
Market share will definitely be down, both in smartphones and in aggregate, but that's not really a surprise given the explosive growth of smartphones. Nokia has actually been keeping pace pretty well with this growth on an industry-average basis but Android is going absolutely gangbusters.
Nokia shipped about 26.5M smartphones last Q. I think 30M is an easily-doable number for Nokia this Q and that they could potentially do as high as 34M given that this is the Christmas quarter and that there was pent-up demand for new models.
Insofar as "American" apps are concerned, Usablenet has been throwing a lot of "apps" up on the Ovi Store that mostly appear to be links to specially-made mobile sites for a very wide variety of American retail and service brands plus various utilities and transit systems too. It seems like there must be a hundred at least that have cropped up over the past week or two. Even more interesting, perhaps, is that a few people actually appear to be downloading and reviewing them. So there are a couple of Americans still buying Nokia products after all.
