Nokia's floundering fortune is the handiwork of company chief executive Stephen Elop, his predecessor said in a recent blog, which also pinned the blame on the embattled CEO for betting too much on Microsoft's mobile platform.

After six quarters of Mr Elop's rule, Nokia is in shambles, according to the Finnish company's former top honcho, Tomi Ahonen, as shown by the mobile phone maker's whopping operating loss of more than $720 million in the September quarter.

In the process, the once dominant smartphone and feature phone vendor is now reduced to a cash reserve of only $4.5 billion, strongly indicating that luck and time is running out for Mr Elop, who remains hopeful that Q4 this year will vindicate his decision to ditch Nokia's Symbian in favour of Windows Phone mobile OS.

Yet the company's latest financial report showed that more than a year after the shift to Microsoft technology, Symbian remains the money-maker of the Finland-based company by easily outselling Nokia handsets on the Windows platform.

According to SmartCompany, Nokia pushed out more than 12 million handsets in the last quarter, with more than 50 per cent of the units labelled as non-smartphones while another 3.4 million of the total smartphone sales actually consisting of Symbian-powered bricks.

Clearly, the Elop strategy rolled out in early 2011 has yet to see the horizon of a Nokia turnaround, Mr Ahonen wrote in his blog.

What the Nokia boss has accomplished is to convert the brand name "into the handset equivalent of Dell," Mr Ahonen claimed, explaining that the company saw its smartphone market pie consistently shrinking since the start of Mr Elop's reign.

"When Mr Elop took over, Nokia had 33 per cent market share in smartphones. Today it is four per cent, he added.

After relishing numerous years of leading the mobile phone industry and even sustaining that position with the emergence of the smartphone segment, Mr Ahonen lamented that Nokia now precariously clings to number nine as 10 of the world's biggest smartphone maker.

He predicted that it would hardly come as a surprise if Nokia would crash out off the list with the way things were unravelling, under of course the leadership of Mr Elop.

And he agreed with analysts that the current quarter would prove both defining for Nokia and Mr Elop with the unveiling of Windows 8, which will govern the functions and features of the company's Lumia smartphones.

Projections, which were based on the reactions generated by the earlier Lumia unwrapping, were not too rosy with some experts hinting that Mr Elop could be on his way out regardless of the actual market acceptance of Windows 8.

If Jean-Louse Gasée, who once served as Apple's pointman in Europe, had his way, according to Joel West of Seeking Alpha, Nokia could easily wiggle recover its mojo by easing out Mr Elop, the sooner the better.

The company then needs to correct its monumental mistake of partnering too tightly with Microsoft by re-training its attention to Android, Mr West said in his report.