Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012.

In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone.

Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.

Android overtook Symbian globally in early 2011. In major markets Android overtook Symbian sometime in late 2009-2010.

HW is hw and sw is SW…and never the twain shall meet.

Hardware problems are low dimensional ones…”optimize this variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally correct.”

Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the problem of designing an API the community will adopt. “What set of functions can I provide that will do X…and a subset of X…and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and H+1 and so on…all while taking security and OS privilege levels into account…” Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as fast as possible…plus tools and documentation…plus outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same devs as us.

Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.

This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business device from a parent etc. It was a super fun time from what I recall!

The closest competitor to Nokias during 2007-2009 I recall was the Sony Ericssons, especially the walkman phones or the slider phones. At least if you were like me and always had to have something different.

I still wish I’d kept my W910i. Unreliable software that would reboot randomly, but a surprisingly sturdy piece of kit that survived many drops and skids. And it was the best camera I had for a while, delivering a wonderful 2MP.

That's right, I forgot about Sony Ericsson but you're correct, very much less common among my friend group, I only recall older people having them...Was Sony Ericsson considered a more premium device?

That's interesting, I mostly remember old folks sticking to flip phones. The SEs were all that could be found among my peers. We would've been in our mid teens at the time.

Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone had either an iPhone or Android.

It was only the space of a few years but seemed much longer back then!

Where in the world were you located at that time? We'd be around the same age I think, I was in Scotland and bought everything from Argos.

I'd have been just across the water in rural Northern Ireland. Argos was very much part of the picture but most phones came from the local O2 shop.

Was just googling around and found this, maybe you would enjoy it also: https://retromash.com/argos/

Thanks mate, I remember Argos had their own website up for a while where every catalogue could be viewed online. Bizarrely, they didn't provide any downloads. So I'm still on the hunt for PDFs of the 2003-2007 catalogues, the ones I'd remember most vividly.

I remember SE phones fondly. Motorola was also quite big with their flip phones (Razr), at least in Croatia.

The best phones I have ever owned were Sony Ericssons. How I yearn for a slightly modernised phone from them! My favourite was one that had a slide-out play station controller. That thing was awesome for wasting time on.

Yep, k700i, k750i, w902 — all superb phones, sometimes I even miss them a bit.

Funny that a few years before that I was a big Palm/Clie enthousiaste, so the idea of "all screen no keyboard" wasn't new to me. Yet I gave up after Tungsten T5 and stayed with just Sony Ericssons for several years with no desire to but a PDA or smartphone.

I had all those phones! And also the "cool" white matrix-style slide-out one. They were really great, except the joystick/navigation thing always failed. Even when you cleaned them out, so annoying.

I miss the jog-dial ones. At least, I remember it very fondly but I would probably hate it now.