Right They didn’t. Neither to customers, nor to what competitors were doing. Just a few examples:
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always releasing heavily underpowered devices (including, or maybe first of all, flagships), thinking that just their brand/logo substitutes for good hardware. For example, the 9210 Communicator came out in 2001 with a 52 MHz ARM9 CPU, 4 MB RAM, no camera, no Bluetooth, and so on, while the first Sony Ericsson Symbian smartphone released at approximately the same time, the UIQ-based P800 had a 156 MHz ARM9 CPU (i.e. 3x faster!), camera, Bluetooth, twice more RAM, 8-times the storage space (16 MB rather than 9210’s 4 MB of which 2 MB were free) and so on. Even the 9300/9500 Communicators in 2004-2005 (i.e. whopping three years later!) still had slower CPUs (150 MHz) than the P800 three years earlier, and in 2005 Sony Ericsson’s Symbian phones were already at 208 MHz and beyond. When Nokia finally added some pathetic VGA camera to the 9500 Communicator (and still NONE in the 9300 Communicator) in 2004-2005, UIQ phones (e.g. the P990) had 2 MPixel cameras with AF. And they kept doing so until their sad end. GPRS, WiFi, GPS, (put yout favourite feature here), all of them added by Nokia to their flagship Symbian devices YEARS after competitors. Google out what a giant failure the N97 was (released as Symbian flagship in 2009) when it was the highest time to start REALLY competing with the rapidly growing popularity of the iPhone. Enough to say, that they equipped the N97 with so little RAM that opening the second tab in web browser was closing all other applications.
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killing off projects. The Symbian based MX and CX series (fantastic designs with huge touch screens, based on Symbian Hildon, created in 2003), never saw the daylight, all of it just dumped. Hildon UI then re-done on Linux and used in Maemo tablets.
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Hildon was a codename of Series 80 3.0. Series 80 was the fantastic platform used in Communicators, based on Symbian Crystal. Series 80 1.0 and 2.0 had large horizontal display, Hildon was adding touch support to it, including large UI elements for finger-control rather than inconvenient stylus. I.e. what then turned out to be the future of smartphones. Nokia management just killed it in 2003.
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the Series 90 platform (derived from Hildon as yet another attempt of great Nokia engineers to do the right things against the company’s management decisions to always choose the lowest and cheapest common denominator) and devices based on it - the 7700, 7710. Huge wide touch screens, buttons for gaming. Never treated seriously. The 7700 never went into mass production, the 7710 produced only in small amounts, not promoted at all, and quickly killed, within less than a year. Then they reused that “gaming” design in the N-Gage series, but with a pathetically small screen and pitiful S60 (non-touch) UI. Which ended up how it ended up.
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If they didn’t kill Hildon and then its successor Series 90, if those large touchscreen devices were treated seriously, promoted and cared for when they were ready, i.e. since late 2003/early 2004, there would have been no space on the market for any iPhones or Androids (as pathetic as they were in their initial versions)
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Maemo tablets, again, never treated seriously as a commercial product but as a geek toy. Very low quantities, zero marketing, years wasted on stubbornly forced “tablet”-only concept, i.e. without the GSM radio. Then eventually the great N900, but only in 2009, i.e. too late (four years wasted since the N800), and still with ZERO promotion and still meant only as a geek device for Linux freaks.
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The worst and most primitive S60 (Series 60) platform (Symbian Quartz) forced at the cost of destroying all the remaining Symbian branches. Nokia killed their own Series 80/Hildon/Series 90 Symbian branches and literally forced UIQ Technologies to kill the UIQ platform (Symbian Pearl). All of those killed platforms were WAY SUPERIOR to S60 and had native touch suppport. Nokia destroyed all platforms with touch and forced the only one WITHOUT TOUCH. Then, when the iPhone came out and they finally realized that touch UX is the future, it took them until 2009 (!!!) to add sluggish touch support to S60, i.e. get back to what they’ve had aready in 2001, and intentionally destroyed. Then it took them another year to bring that touch support on S60 to a usable and kind of enjoyable state (along with the introduction of Qt on Symbian).
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How they killed the Symbian consortium, then the Symbian Foundation and the whole Symbian open source project, by brute forcing all the other participants to drop the other - way superior - Symbian platforms in favour of Nokia’s inferior and pathetic S60. Very soon everyone left and they remained the only Symbian vendor.
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Finally, the MeeGo history - how they killed their partnership with Intel and the whole project. Intel did their part and the tablet and laptop UXes were really done and released. Nokia never did their part and never did anything about the MeeGo Phone UX that they were supposed to create. And then they just showed Intel their middle finger. OK, it was already under Elop, but still. And who let Elop in, if not them?
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As one of their final breaths - they released Maemo Harmattan as “MeeGo” that it actually wasn’t (except for a few things ported from MeeGo). And again, the fantastic N950 with beatiful keyboard never made it into mass production, and the marvellous N9 was manufactured in small quantities and without any serious promotion. Killed off after merely 8 months of sales, despite (IIRC) > 1 million units sold and ongoing demand, which was really huge for a completely unpromoted project, introduced as “the last MeeGo device, not to be continued”. But they had to release it to fulfill the agreement with Intel, or Intel might sue them. So they did, but they underminded it as much as possible.
So yes, @WT.Sane, I dare to say that they screw*d up literally everything they could. Let’s keep Jolla as far away as possible from even those sad remnants of all those Nokia top managers, for the good of Jolla.