The market at that point pretty much decided to skip that mess and go with IOS or Android.
Not at all. You just have to be a company that is a) private, b) not funded by VC, and c) profitable enough. Then all you have to do is just politely reject all incoming requests (e.g., "sorry, we are not interested [at this time]"). :-)
"Promising" is an interesting choice of words here.
If anything, "promising" may be the wrong choice of words because it was arguably better and more mature than the equivalent debut iOS and webOS devices at launch. Of course that's cheating a bit, as the tech stack had some history behind it by that point. Still, for a line-incepting product it was very impressive execution, especially for a company that was still so hung up on a legacy product line at the same time (Symbian).
Personally, I used one as well and I don't find it very hard to imagine a version of the world where it could still be my preferred OS/ecosystem right now. It was truly a strange situation, and Nokia of the day one strange animal of a dissonant company. I don't know if Nokia would have made it without the MS interference -- but I think it didn't help.
This is a nice little nostalgia anecdote too that gets discussed on HN occasionally: http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...
Not just startups. They tried to acquire Nokia's handset business and initially failed. Stephen Elop (ex-MS) was installed as new CEO via investor pressure, Nokia abandoned their promising Linux-based phones and changed direction to Windows Mobile and then it was acquired after all. And failed.
Elop has, of course, denied having been a trojan horse for Microsoft at Nokia after the initial failed acquisiton attempt. Nokia's share price and profit lowered considerably during his tenure as a CEO, making it much cheaper to acquire.
Resisting acquisition can be very challenging, and takes a lot of energy and time.