The Nokia partnership with HP fell silent when the Communicator was released. Nokia never got much more productivity software running - Symbian slowed them down and the consumer business distracted them. RIM took over the segment for some time, iPhone was released and the rest is history.
That thing and a Nokia 6110 saw me through college very nicely. Just enough functionality to be useful. The whole HP LX line was really cool and was even more impressive when you factored in that it was an 80186 running MS-DOS.
The phone dock, incidentally, was for a Nokia 2110. There's a Nokia Cellular Data Card in a hidden PCMCIA slot in the LX (lower base section if memory serves), with a cable leading up inside the unit to the dock.
Yet, PlaszmaOS could have been a real boon in the industry - especially if they'd licensed it off to all the Asian clone makers. It could've slowed Android, anyway, imho ..
Android survived (IMHO) because they hyperfocused and took basically only the linux kernel and replaced most of the userspace, especially all the XOrg stuff, focused on the Java API and that was it and then shipped.
Of course Google money helped, but it's not like Google never fumbled a product before.
And arguably a lot earlier when they chose Symbian over mobile Linux for the first time in the late nineties. This was when the early trend that Linux was heading for the embedded and mobile space were already bleedingly obvious to industry insiders. It killed Symbian touch screen OS after Apple iphone rumors got quite serious (2005) and then relaunched it in a hurry when it became clear that they were actually launching it. If you trace back Android's roots, you arrive more or less at a period where Symbian was still in the R&D stage and several companies were attempting a mobile linux. Android was one of them and was picked up by Google eventually.
Around the time the iphone rumors got serious (2004-2005) was in the same time frame that Nokia's internal linux mobile OS showed promise. The n770 tablet launched in 2006 and featured Debian linux (complete with apt-get update and oss repos full of oss tools and software), x-windows, and a mozilla based browser. Yet this platform was never allowed anywhere near anything resembling a premium smartphone until 2012. Attempts to create a platform with mobile phone capability were consistently shelved for years.
The reasons for this were entirely political. Maemo and later Meego were perpetually targeted at developer devices because it was considered a threat to Symbian. Projects to target premium phones with Maemo/Meego died over and over again. The N8 (cool metal design with a 13mp camera in 2010) actually started out life as a Meego phone but then turned into a Symbian phone (arguably one of the better ones) because management chickened out. If there ever was a chance for Nokia to make a move against Apple and Google; that would have been it. Never happened because senior management chickened out. The only proper phone that actually made it to market, the n9, was only launched after they decided to kill the whole platform and go for Lumia & MS. For that reason once more never got the benefit of Nokia's marketing and distribution reach.
I can't stress enough the utter stupidity of repeatedly killing (multiple) smart phone platforms with full OSS browsers, awesome developer tooling, and all the multi media stuff you could ever want throughout the development cycles of Android and IOS. When the iphone finally launched they had nothing whatsoever worth shipping.
The N97 mentioned in the article was gobbled together in a hurry and so bad that it allowed Apple and Google to rapidly claim marketshare. Attempts to fix Symbian amounted to too little too late and futile posturing. Throughout this, Meego was considered a threat rather than a solution and attempts to get it to market were frustrated with decisions to continue focus on Symbian over and over again. Meanwhile, Nokia continued to 'differentiate' with under powered devices with cheap CPUs and not enough RAM to shave a few dollars of a device that people did not want. A misguided deal to partner with Intel did not help either. Apple meanwhile correctly identified that margins on smart phones ought to be measured in hundreds of dollars and did not save pennies on materials, hardware, or bother crippling their own software to please the operators. Nokia did all of that. When Nokia got rid of their chip developers, Apple was planning to move CPU development in house. When Apple and Google chose capacitive touch screens, Nokia continued to ship crappy resistive touch screens, because they were cheaper. Technical ineptitude and penny saving is what killed Nokia.
Bot Android and IOS were very limited platforms in their first years. IOS had no SDK in the first version at all and Android devices were a combination of slow and buggy and poorly designed. However, Nokia was a no show and gave them over half a decade to fix this before it eventually folded. Fun fact: a lot of the early Android development was actually done on N800's (Nokia's maego tablet launched in 2007; several years before the ipad): reason Android and Maego shared much of the kernel internals and Nokia was a big kernel contributor and because it was open source, booting another OS was easy and common on these devices. So, Nokia enabled Google massively with their awesome developer oriented devices, tooling, and kernel contributions that they just could not be bothered to target at consumers. Ultimately Google said thank you very much and launched Android and never looked back.
This serial stragic blundering is what killed Nokia.