It's always interesting to get 'real world' snapshots of a market from developers. I.e. independent of analysts and sales figures. In this case it's a detailed breakdown by device of the Windows Phone market, courtesy of the developer of a scientific calculator in the Store. Top dog in the Windows Phone world? No surprises here - it's the Lumia 520, of course, the biggest bargain across the industry.

From Tamoggemon Holding comes:

HTC and Samsung's Windows Phones account for less than 5% of total sales - Microsoft's buy-up of Nokia raised quite a few heads in the industry. Pundits expected both Samsung and HTC to be ired by this announcement. This can not be further from the truth – their Windows Phones simply don't sell in meaningful numbers, judging from our numbers. By analyzing the user statistics of scientific calculator TouchCalc, over the Christmas period, new users showed up with the following handsets:

1. Lumia 520 33.4%
2. Lumia 710   8%
3. Lumia 505   6.2%
4. Lumia 610   6%
5. Lumia 620   5.5%
6. Lumia 625   5.1%
7. Lumia 720   5%
8. Lumia 920   4.6%
9. Lumia 521   4%
10. Lumia 800   3.5%
11. [rest]         18.7%

Sadly, the line designated as 'rest' is largely made up of more expensive or niche Nokia devices, such as the Lumia 925 and 1020. The most successul Non-Nokia device is apparently the Samsung ATIV S, which managed a user share of just 1.35%.

No surprises at the number one in the list though - the 520 has sold in huge numbers on 'pay as you go' across Europe in particular, with prices as low as an unbelievable £60 in some cases. In the stats above, it was shown with four times the usage of any other Windows Phone handset.

It's very notable that there's a big budget focus in the list above - outside of power users reading this site(!), people really don't seem to be picking up Windows Phones at the more expensive end of the market - a fact which must give Nokia (and now Microsoft) a few worries at night.

Also interesting is that the very old Lumia 710 is so high - this is clearly still in use in high numbers (the '520' of its day?), even though Windows Phone 7.8 is now at the end of its timeline.

The calculator stats quoted are for TouchCalc, here in the Store. You can find out more about Tamoggemon Holding here.