I agree the user interface was a huge difference, but Nokia did have high spec-ed and priced battery burners like the N95. They even sold quite well, for example over their lifetimes there were 10 million N95s sold and 6 million iPhone 1s.
The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc.
N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great.
I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs demoing the iPhone prototype. Couldn't believe for a second that the Nokia's way would work out with S60 series and was super surprised to hear N95 was selling really well.
Of course iPhone would gather steam for a couple of years before getting good enough but still.
I think that was largely a Symbian thing - having used the Symbian phones before the N95, it felt sensible (and more akin to a desktop OS, with context menus etc)
I mean, presumably because it was the last smartphone Nokia made and Nokia was an established name, whereas the iPhone was new and the iPhone 3G was released after only a year.
In other words, it didn't sell more because it was actually viable competition. It sold more because of brand momentum and because it was on sale for longer.
Nokia kept making smartphones after the N95 in the "nseries", such as for example the N900 in 2009. I just mean to say there was appetite for 1 day devices with lots of apps and features before the iPhone came around - keep in mind the iOS appstore was released a year after the iPhone's launch, initially "apps" was a feature on the N95s side.[1]
Also while the N95 stuck around for a while, the N95 did sell more rapidly than the first iPhone. Assuming the dates Wikipedia uses are accurate the N95 reached 7 million units at the end of 2007 after being released in March of that year, and then 10 million by end of Q1 2008. The iPhone was released June 2007 and discontinued July 2008 and sold 6.1 million units. That being said availability of the first iPhone was limited outside the US and it was limited to Cingular, and the N95 wasn't sold via carriers in the US.
I think the carrier locking was a very significant factor for comparing early phone sales: you were looking at a hefty easily termination to switch and two year contracts were common so the average American was probably looking at a year before they could switch to any carrier’s exclusive device.
There was Nokia N96, N97, N8 (which was nice), N900, Nokia 5800... Let alone N9. There was also Nokia 808, which used basically the same camera sensor as Lumia 1020.
(will exclude here the Windows Phone devices of course...).
