The tide may be changing for Nokia as it sees best ever Lumia sales

There's some good news coming out of the Nokia camp today as the Finnish firm reports its best ever Lumia smartphone sales.

During the first quarter of 2013, Nokia saw sales of its Lumia handsets increase by a healthy 27 per cent quarter-on-quarter, managing to shift 5.6 million of the Windows Phone-toting units.

It's not all good news though, as after Nokia returned to profitability in the final quarter of last year it has managed to post a small loss of around $196 million (£130 million/AU$190 million) on what has been its lowest quarterly revenue since 1999.

You also have to consider Nokia is still some way off the likes of Samsung and Apple, with predictions suggesting we'll see 37 million iPhones shipped during the same quarter. It's also worth remembering that the number of phones shipped is not the same as the number of phones sold.

Fall of the feature phone

Although Nokia had an encouraging boost in smartphone sales the Lumia range is still dwarfed by the firm's feature phone offering, with the company shipping 55.8 million mobile phone units over the same period.

That said volumes of Nokia's mobile phones fell by a hefty 30 per cent quarter-on-quarter, which shows how the world is starting to shift towards smartphones as they become increasingly more affordable.

We reckon things will only get better for Nokia as the year progresses with the recent launch of the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720 adding to the firm's strong arsenal of Windows Phone 8 devices.

Plus if the various rumours about the 41MP Nokia EOS, leaner Lumia 920 copycat the Catwalk and the mystery Galaxy Note rival turn out to be true it could be a really exciting 12 months in Finland.