It's hardly surprising that, after unveiling Nokia's first Windows Phone specifically designed for the North American market, analysts are suddenly more optimistic about the platform's fortunes.

Nokia's Lumia 900 – broadly speaking, the bigger brother of the Lumia 800 that hit shop shelves around the rest of the globe in November – took pride of place during the Finnish firm's CES 2012 press conference, and now Morgan Stanley estimates 37 million Nokia Windows Phones could be sold worldwide in 2012.

Doubling up

What's more, 2013 will see sales almost double, with 64 million handsets dropping into the pockets of consumers around the globe throughout the course of the year.

Nokia isn't, of course, the only manufacturer supporting Windows Phone, and the firm estimates that - with HTC numbers added to the total - 43 million Windows Phones in all will hit the market during 2012, jumping to 74 million during the following 12 months.

That means Morgan Stanley expects Nokia to take hold of 86 percent of the Windows Phone market both this year and the next - excluding the likes of Samsung, which wasn't included in the estimate, presumably due to the lack of new handsets from the firm.

All about the money

The optimistic projections come after reports suggested Nokia, Microsoft and AT&T had set aside a total of $100 million to market the Lumia 900 at launch in the US.

Indeed, Windows IT Pro senior technical analyst Paul Thurrott has since claimed the total figure could be double that, having clapped eyes on official figures sourced from within Microsoft.

"According to the internal Microsoft documentation I've viewed, the total cost of this marketing tsunami is in the neighborhood of $200 million, not $100 million," claimed Thurrott on the site.

"And again, that's just for the United States. And on AT&T at least, Nokia is outspending Microsoft 2-to-1."

[source: AllThingsD]