Gotta agree with the others,the numbers aren't so good...Hopefully sales will pick up soon.

Considering it had 500M allocated to advertising I would say these sales are quite bad, plus I hear the thing is so incredibly bare boned compared to it's competitors.

I would think twice before purchasing one.

Where do people keep plucking this 500m advertising figure, I mean if this is combined with the apparent "500m for Kinect" that people keep using all the time, MS have already supposedly spend 1 BILLION on two products? wut?

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/18/microsofts-kinect-and-windows-phone-7-marketing-blitz-to-top-1b/

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/08/windows_phone_7_13.html

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/08/27/microsoft.to.put.half.billion.in.marketing.wp7/

http://www.gbcghana.com/index.php?id=1.110174

http://www.pcworld.com/article/204306/windows_phone_7_to_get_half_a_billion_dollar_marketing_blitz.html

http://www.itproportal.com/2010/8/27/microsoft-spend-500-million-windows-phone-7-launch/

http://www.edibleapple.com/microsoft-to-spend-upwards-of-500-million-for-windows-phone-7-launch-but-will-it-be-enough/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dollars-windows-phone-7/

Wow that is severe overkill for advertising budget, funny thing is I've only seen a few adverts of it where the stupid avatar dude is sitting in a chair and playing his phone and his girlfriend is off getting him some chips or w/e

I have only seen a few as well. Makes me wonder where in the hell they advertised.

Well they are still spending it right now but yeah.. 1 billion dollar for a few months is nothing crazy.. now I'm sure a part of that money is spend to persuade developers to develop for WP7 but a worldwide campaign (say 30plus countries) starts at a minimum of 150 million dollar.. estimates for companies as Coca Cola and Mcdonalds are like 2 billion dollar each year they spend on marketing worldwide..

I've seen a TON.  Awareness is definitely out there.  So why haven't I got one?  

1) Can't afford right now (bigger reason).

2) Not on Verizon yet.  In the US, anyway, there are a ton of Verizon and Sprint customers and I'd imagine some of them just filled up on Android phones this holiday because MS and the OEM's weren't able to get GSM and CDMA devices ready for launch.

Then again, who knows how much this advertising campaign compares to other comparable product launches or how long this budget is for (just launch or for the whole year).

EDIT: Looks like the amount is analyst speculation and not something official from MS.  http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dollars-windows-phone-7/

Morgan Stanley predicts 28m Windows 7 phones to be sold next year so if they are correct (and recently they have made a couple bad predictions) then there is still hope...though many has now disagreed with this and those predictions were made about the time it launched and before this report.

The bad news is that they also predicted 115m Android phones to be sold in 2011 so even if they are correct it's still a massive win for Android.

I want to add that If they get office 365 on WP7 really good working (security and an alternative to BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) they have a good chance eating into RIM's Blackberry Business crowd.. cause iOS and Android are lacking in that department..