The market clearly disagrees, NOKIA has lost hundreds of millions of sales since deprecating Symbian and even now, despite all the damage Elop has done to Symbian, despite the fact carriers in NOKIA's major markets no longer offer Symbian devices on contract or PAYG and despite an enormous marketing campaign lavished on Lumias which NOKIA, M$ and AT&T have all contributed huge sums of money to, NOKIA's Symbian phones continue to outsell their WP7 phones.

That tells us more about WP7 than it does about Symbian. The decline for Symbian was inevitable, carriers and retailers were never going to continue marketing Symbian handsets after they had been announced obsolete by NOKIA's own CEO, but what's the excuse for WP7?

Why haven't the Lumias more than compensated for the decline in Symbian? They've had better hardware than Symbian ever enjoyed, they certainly have a much more stylish design than any Symbian phone we've ever seen, there's been no expense spared in the marketing and yet the sales figures are absolutely pitiful.

As you rightly say the Lumia 800 is a great phone, which suggests the reason it doesn't sell is because it desperately needs a great OS to do it justice - Symbian? Android? MeeGo? Probably even Series 40 with swipe would sell better on the Lumias than WP7 does.

It's clear to anyone WP7 is the problem, even Samsung, who currently have the Midas touch, couldn't make it sell. Neither could HTC, neither could LG.

I hope for NOKIA's sake M$ can get WP8 nearer to the calibre of Android, Symbian and MeeGo or else NOKIA are doomed.

If I were currently part of NOKIA's in house design team I would recruit a few of my colleagues to secretly test out Android, Open webOS, Firefox OS and Tizen on each and every handset in the range in preperation for the awakening - the moment the board suddenly come out of their stupor, regain their senses and realise what a horrendous hole Elop's dug NOKIA into.

The reason NOKIA's Q2 performance wasn't as bad as anticipated was largely due to the feature phone division holding up better than expected but we know in the last few weeks Elop has got rid of the manager there, he's also discontinued Meltemi and so damaged their future prospects too. Looks like he's intent on working his magic in that division too.

As for the cash holding up better than expected did anyone check the creditors and creditor days figures? Maybe they just delayed paying their major suppliers until after the end of the accounting period knowing their cash position would be more likely to make the headlines.