I remember going through the Verizon specs for phones and manufacturer at the time (N9 wasn't properly out yet, so we were targeting N900). Verizon had not updated their hardware requirements so it was impossible to get approval for a modern phone at the time.

For context: less than 18 months earlier the phone manufacturers had finally agreed, after a long consumer campaign, to all support combined data and power over a single cable. This allowed to get rid of custom chargers everybody hated.

Verizon's specs at the time still mandated that any phone they sold had to have separate power and data sockets. How do I remember? I spotted this brilliant piece of malice in their specs and raised it with the project lead, who then took it higher up.

How did it do compared to the iPhone?

Great question!

Compared to iPhone, N9 had a practically zero marketing budget, and an announcement at launch that the platform has no future as Nokia is going all-in on a Microsoft partnership.

As far as an apples-to-oranges comparison can be made, N9 did great.

Must be hard to be an engineer and have management destroy your beautiful project. “Bridge on the river Kwai.”

However, management had reasons. There was no room for a third platform.

I also note the unfalsifiability of some of these claims. On the one hand if N9 beat the Windows phone, that shows how awesome it was. On the other hand, if it was destroyed by the iPhone, well, it was sabotaged.