Nokia's had a challenging year transitioning to Windows Phone to power its range of smartphones, but Lumia sales have been slowly and steadily increasing quarter-on-quarter. Nokia has just announced its Q3 2012 financial results today, and the company has revealed that just 2.9 million Lumia devices were sold in its recent quarter. Nokia previously shipped 4 million Lumia devices in its last quarter, making this a sharp decrease of 28 precent and nearly 10 million sales to date.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is due to hold a conference call with analysts shortly, but he offered no direct comment on the decreased Lumia sales in the company's earnings release today. "Q3 was a difficult quarter in our Devices & Services business," says Elop. Nokia says volumes decreased "as we shared the exciting innovation ahead with our new line of Lumia products."

Nokia's North American device sales take a 50 percent hit

Nokia's North American mobile device volumes also dropped too, by 50 percent quarter-on-quarter. Nokia doesn't break out the individual device sales in North America, but the company sold just 300,000 compared to the 600,000 figure from Q2.

Nokia is widely expected to launch its latest Windows Phone 8 devices in early November, offering a number of Lumia 820 variants and the highly anticipated Lumia 920 to customers. Although Elop previously said "Lumia activations were flat to up in the weeks following Windows Phone 8 announcement," it's clear that customers have shied away from Lumia following the revelation of no upgrades to Microsoft's latest operating system.

Update: At a press conference discussing today's earnings report, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop just gave his thoughts on the Lumia line's dwindling sales in North America. He said that, "having spent most of the quarter explaining to the US population about the great innovations that are coming in Q4, one could reasonably expect that would impact sales in Q3."