Stephen Elop grabs an acid yellow phone from the colourful array fanned out before him on a table at his London office and taps at the screen until a photograph appears. "I'm not supposed to show pictures of my family but … this is one of my beautiful daughters," says the Nokia chief executive and father of five. A pretty blonde child sitting at a restaurant table looks calmly into the lens. But only with one eye – the other swivels unnervingly. "You can do some creepy things with this," he says, grinning.

Another shot has a chef cooking at a brazier – a still image, but the flame flickers. The trick is done with editing software that overlays photographs with snatches of film, one of the features Elop hopes will make customers fall in love with his Lumia smartphones.

It is just over two years since Elop, the first non-Finnish boss of Nokia in its 150-year history, compared the company to a man standing on a burning platform and vowed to create a device that could rival the iPhone.

In February 2011 the Canadian announced a deal with his former employer Microsoft to rebuild Nokia's business using Windows Phone software. Six months later the first Lumia handsets were unveiled in London, and now there are five models at various prices, with more to come. But sales have been slow, reaching 4.4m in the Christmas quarter. In the same three-month period Apple sold 48m iPhones.

"When we think about the milestones along this journey we are very focused on first getting to a double-digit market share, talking about Windows Phone collectively," says Elop. And how long will that take? The share of smartphones running on Windows rose by one percentage point in 2012 to 3%, according to the research firm Gartner.

"Now we have to see if that builds and grows," says Elop. "It is about showing progress, strengthening the brand, improving the financials. It's hard to predict what rate over what time."

The next set of numbers, due on 18 April, will be crucial not only to Nokia but in determining how long Elop remains at the helm of the company which became part of a group which can trace its roots to a pulp mill in south-west Finland in 1865.

The first hand held mobile, weighing a hefty 1.7lbs, was launched in the 1980s and dubbed the "Gorba", named after Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev who was pictured with the Mobira Cityman.

These days a $1bn-a-year marketing budget – courtesy of Microsoft – has made the slim-line Lumia one of the most product-placed phones on television, as fans of the US series Homeland may have noticed. Lack of awareness cannot be blamed if sales are poor.

Elop has his sights firmly set on BlackBerry's 80 million users. The two firms are following similar journeys as they move on from handsets that manage calls, texts and emails to those that offer full access to the internet.

For BlackBerry's corporate customers this means big changes: not only buying new phones, but ripping out the old servers used to run its older handsets. "Virtually any [head of IT] out there today is probably thinking pretty hard about the investments they've made in a competing platform for business mobility," says Elop, avoiding referring to the opposition by name. "This is an interesting time to reconsider what's the next generation, and of course we're looking at that as a real opportunity. It's a moment, it's a point of disruption."

Mall of America in the US has swapped BlackBerry for Nokia, and Sports Direct in the UK has done likewise– saving, Nokia claims, £14,400 a year on fees. The estate agent Foxtons has also bought a job lot of Lumias.

Originally from Ontario, Elop studied computer engineering at McMaster University where he helped create one of the first internet networks in Canada by laying cable around his campus. He worked at software company Lotus before becoming head of IT at Boston Chicken, a fast-food chain that over-expanded and filed for bankruptcy in 1998. A career in IT firms followed – Macromedia, Adobe, a year at Juniper Networks – before Elop landed at Microsoft. There he oversaw the Office products for nearly three years before making the leap to Nokia.

Turning around an outdated industrial group was never going to be easy. When Elop joined Nokia's decline had begun but it still had revenues of €40bn (£34bn), operating profits of €1.2bn and 120,000 employees. By the end of 2012, to stop the company bleeding cash, tens of thousands of jobs had been cut and factories closed.

Sales are now €30bn, losses €2.3bn, and there are 98,000 staff, with more than half working in the telecoms equipment joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks. Samsung has seized Nokia's crown as the largest maker of mobile phones. "This is the fastest collapse of a market leader ever, in any industry," Tomi Ahonen, a former Nokia executive and one of Elop's loudest critics, wrote last month.

Shaun Collins, of the research firm CCS Insight, says hitching Nokia's destiny to that of another firm was risky. Microsoft let slip recently that support for Windows Phone 8, the mobile interface on which Nokia's new handsets are built, would end in July 2014.

"Their future as a mobile company is inextricably linked to Microsoft's ambition in the mobile market," says Collins. "I wonder if some of the relationship has cooled. Maybe Microsoft's ambitions in mobile are cooling."

The nadir for Elop came in June last year with 10,000 job cuts, the closure of Nokia's last factory in Finland, and a second profit warning in nine weeks. The shares crashed to their lowest point since 1996.

"There are moments where you fall short of expectations, you issue a profit warning, which causes everyone to cringe," says Elop. "But when I see the employees proud and focused and doing great work, you know there are good times ahead because that's what sets the tone for the whole company."

He travels unrelentingly, wooing phone networks and corporate customers. A widget called Track My Life shows a map of the globe on his phone, dotted with bubbles of different sizes representing where he spends the most time. This year alone Elop's air miles have produced 30 bubbles, although Finland and America, where his family live, are the largest.

He insists that with enough hard work the Apple and Samsung duopoly can be broken. Elop had not yet handled Samsung's latest flagship model, the Galaxy S4, whose recent Broadway musical-themed launch in New York featured a tap-dancing child and street performers. But he questions the usefulness of the dizzying array of technology packed into it.

"It's not a technology war, it's about how we can make your life a little easier, a little faster, a little more creative. Engineering is more than just the number of megapixels."

But success is still measured in numbers, and investors hope the next set will paint a brighter picture for Nokia.