Nokia made too many phones

Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android.

Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones.

Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires.

And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved.

That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete.

The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue.

Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard.

Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.

The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.

At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.

I think this reads like a comment from a market where S60 wasn't popular. They had a capable app platform and it wasn't java or wap, but not really in North America. (That's part of the problem... They segmented their potential customers too much. They could have pushed smartphones in North America at the same time as in Europe. At the time I heard they didn't because it would piss off carriers.)

My apologies, and thanks very much for the correction. On another note, has there ever been any custom OSes for the late 2000s era Nokia dumb phones, built by some stubborn hackers? Or some modification software to hand-tailor the Series 40 iterations, e.g remove features the user doesn't need. That would make these phones fun to mess with.

I went back from a launch day iPhone (original) to an N95. Symbian was ace for its time.