Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.
Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
All the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.
No, there were quite a few Symbian models which used capacitive touch, combined with a modern Qt based Symbian OS. Check out "Symbian Belle" and the phone models released with that OS version. I loved my Nokia 603 :)
But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.
They were in parallel, due to the whole Symbian vs Linux politics at Nokia between teams, both platforms got ramped down to Windows Phone 7 introduction and burning platforms memo.
The N900 was released more for a question of honour than anything.
As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
I've always asumed it wasn't a good enough OS just from the consumer news articles I read, was a freshman at the time. What was technically remarkable about it?
It was a direct competitor for Android at that time. GUI was really nice. I don't think it was essentially worse than Android. There was the potential.
It wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US).
Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
It's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.
Nokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.
"In 1998 alone, the company had sales revenue of $20 billion, making $2.6 billion profit. By 2000, Nokia employed over 55,000 people and had a market share of 30% in the mobile phone market, almost twice as large as its nearest competitor, Motorola."
The mobile phone business was ruined (perhaps they should have used Android), therefore caution about new foreign influence is warranted.
You don't understand: phones were just small part of their business. They are stull tier 1 teleco stuff provider worldwide (gsm, umts, ltr, 5g, core, rrus and bbus etc.)
There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.
They may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.
Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?