So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?
• iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen.
• Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google killed it, MSFT would have done the same to Google if places were interchanged). Other comments have detailed possible leadership sabotage related to the MSFT deal, which I agree with.
That's true of several mobile hardware/SW of that time, I mentioned capacitive screen to show typical consumer preference.
Btw, you can also add native 3G video calling via front camera to that list, my Nokia N70 did that years earlier in India. Not many westerners seem to know about this feature in my earlier discussions.
The market have shifted. Before iphone, everyone was trying to build the smalles phone possible. Jobs convinced the world for brick sized devices and SymbianOS lost its USP - doing a lot on small batteriess. Had there been a wearables market back then, it could have had a second lease of life.
Which is why Elop got the bonus from Nokia shareholders as per the signed contract. Finn press found out all the dirt about the contract back then, and the news are still relatively easy to track down.
