> but they had massive advantages over both Apple and Google and with good guidance could've survived successfully.

I can't agree more. Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. With a bit of polish it could have grown into a fantastic product line. In fact, the N9 was pretty much a masterpiece.

I remember wanting to buy it. I didn't because back then it was to much money for me. I remember thinking that I defently want a future version of it.

For some reason that I don't understand, they continued to push Symbian, and those phones were not good. I remember thinking, either push further on the MeeGo stuff or drop it and move to Android. They did neither and suffered for it.

Symbian devices were actually very good phones. For making and receiving voice calls, they were better than Android has ever been.

Of course, as a platform for Web browsing, and particularly for app development, Symbian was not good.

But I still miss the phone functionality of my E71, or the Symbian devices I had before it.

And this was their undoing: thinking that people really cared that much about talking on the phone.

Talking is one of my least-used functions on my Android phone. I use it far, far more for texting, apps, internet, navigation, games, photos, and even visual voicemail than I do for talking. I might have a handful of calls a week on it. A phone that's great for talking and sucks for all the other things would be mostly useless to me.

> Of course, as a platform for Web browsing, and particularly for app development, Symbian was not good.

So in other words - they were great phones, but terrible smartphones? I fully agree.

Again, depends on what is "smart". For many day-to-day things, Symbian phones were superior to current smart phones as well. Some of this is more about security/commercial setup than technology, but 15 years ago, I was able to synchronize Outlook calendar to a Symbian phone, and it would remind me of my meetings, and it worked great.

Android or iPhone could do the same technically, but my employer can no longer use it. The company would give all data about meetings to Google or Apple. It's an absolute no-no.

Thus I sometimes forget my meetings, as the phone no longer reminds me.

Also, the alarm clock of Symbian was great, and i could depend on it. Even if you turned the phone off, it would wake you up. I'm nervous about trusting any Android device to wake me up in the morning if I have to catch a plane or a train (and I understand it's the same with iPhone).

>Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone.

I owned one of these. It was an ugly, slow, expensive brick. I'd much rather use a Treo from that period. The iPhone was a wonderfully svelte device compared to either. I don't think you're appreciating how badly Apple beat up the Palm and Nokia competition back then. It was absolutely no contest and a disruption that was badly needed. Holding up the 770 as some under-appreciated jewel is fairly ridiculous. It was comically out of touch with consumers.

It was just an alpha device, and a Nokia side-project. It didn't even have a phone radio. The N800 was a pre-iPhone device and quite more polished. The N900 and N9 are, in my opinion, still better than many devices we see today in the market. And they are 6 years old...

I don't have any inside information but as an outsider the main thing that puts pressure on everyone is the margin that Apple commands on its products. People have repeatedly said that even when iPhone had 20% of the smartphones sold, they were taking in a much bigger slice of the pie when it came to profits. How do we tell potential shareholders "you can put your $1 on Apple or you can put your $1 on us but just so you know we have to ship n times as many phones as Apple does just to make the same amount of money that Apple does".

> Smartphones outsold feature (dumb) phones only in 2013, five years after the iPhone came out.

Yes but who had higher profits? That's the real factor. Outselling by itself is meaningless if your margins are poor.

I agree. In India Nokia was voted as "Most Trusted Brand" for years. Cell phone == Nokia in India. All they had to do was to put Android in some phones as an arbitrage move and they could have still been the leader in that space in India. Which has grown like 8x in last 5 years.