The early holiday sales had been kind so far to Nokia that it left the company's stocks of Lumia 920s depleted, reports said.

Indications appeared solid that as of Friday last week, the Lumia 920, at least in the North American region, has run out of supply. Amazon, which offers very attractive deals on the handsets, posted an advisory on its web site that says delivery of the product can only be made after two weeks of placing the order or even more.

According to the blog site The Markets Are Open, with the way the Lumia 920 is moving worldwide "a couple of millions of units of Nokia Lumia 920 will be sold across the globe before 2012 ends."

The same blog pointed to the 920's PureView camera technology as the Nokia flavour most sought-after by consumers, which allows for the production of high-quality pictures and videos through a device running on Microsoft's new Windows Phone 8 that has garnered raves from tech experts.

However, the same platform is also responsible for holding off the Lumia 920's total breakout owing to its limited apps at the moment, which undeniably limits Nokia's tack of packaging the flagship phone as more than a communication device, analysts said.

This waterloo, which hopefully would be addressed by Microsoft soon, prevents the Lumia 920 from really measuring it up with the giants up there such Apple's iPhone and currently the most preferred smartphone brand, Samsung's Galaxy S3.

But the current figures associated with the Lumia 920 are quite impressive, according to Global Equities Research managing director Trip Chowdhry.

The sell outs Nokia has recorded last week only confirmed earlier reports that Lumia smartphones are currently the headliners in the WP8 segment, with the Finnish company controlling more than 50 per cent shares of the overall WP8 handset market, Mr Chowdhry told Nasdaq.com.

"If the company can maintain that dominance as the platform grows, it could one day prove to be a formidable competitor to Apple and Samsung," the same NASDAQ report said.

"Nokia has a very real chance of becoming the world's third-largest manufacturer of smartphones," the report added.