Nokia's gambit may be paying off as reports came out this week that its Lumia product lines breached the one million mark by the end of December last year, boosting the company's efforts to recover its lost ground soon.

According to Bloomberg, analysts have projected that combined sales of Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 reached at least 1.3 million units by the last month of the past year, which experts said, if proven correct, should make Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop very happy and maybe partly vindicated.

In a move that elicited doubts from Nokia investors, Elop presided over the planned demise of its in-house Symbian mobile operating system and struck a deal with Microsoft that would center the Finnish firm's future handset makes on Windows Phone.

There were no fireworks when the Nokia-Microsoft partnership was sealed on February 2011 and Elop even refused to wow his company's shareholders with projected earning figures that hopefully would bring Nokia closer to competitors in the lucrative mobile device market.

The CEO simply declared that Nokia's decision to tie up with Microsoft requires longer timetable to appreciate its true worth.

Apart from regaining what were lost in the previous years, among them its stature as the leading smartphone maker, its credit downgrade recently and the billions that were wiped out in share value, Nokia, Elop insisted, is firming up to reestablish its ecosystem.

And that gigantic blueprint apparently depends heavily on Microsoft's mobile platform that was last accounted as miles away from Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

The good news is Nokia's new numbers were accepted with enough optimism by analysts, with Espen Furnes of Storebrand Asset Management telling Bloomberg that the numbers are promising as far as Nokia is concerned.

"If Nokia is able to have a strong launch and surpass at least 1 million and keep that type of momentum, this would help put them in a credible position that is crucial to winning back investors," Furnes added.

To lure back the interest of the market, Nokia needs to sustain the interests already created by the Lumia handsets, which after all won raves from experts and consumers alike during the recent Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.

That would mean more versions of Lumia are expected this year and hopefully, with more bumps coming from Microsoft, app developers would take notice and pour out the same energy that they extended to Android and iOS before and provide more interesting apps.

Also, tech experts noted that save for the obvious dominance of Apple and in some ways Samsung's Galaxy devices, the market is mostly wanting for a device that would deliver the innovations carried by Apple but with relative affordability.

Nokia can very well assume that role, which is not new at all for a company that still tops other companies in terms of overall sales in the mobile phone market.

Thanks to its feature phone products, Nokia used to sell an average of 400 million units each year, and just maybe the company may be able to put together the right formula that could prop up Lumia as the new 'feature phone of smartphones'.

Evidently, Elop is very proud of Nokia's Windows-based phone, even declaring earlier that only Nokia sells the true Windows phone despite similar products offered by HTC and Samsung.

The difference, according to Digital Trends, is Nokia's unabashed marketing of its Windows-powered handsets that effectively dwarfed that of rivals' efforts, if any at all.

And Elop has reasons to be upbeat too as Bloomberg reported that Lumia may end up on the hands of 3.2 million new owners by the end of March, with Morgan Stanley predicting that some 37 million Windows Phones could be purchased by the end of 2012.

Elop hopes that most of those would bear the name Nokia.