They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.
Oh, but they pretended to. Just like Samsung today.
Top management really needs to have people with deep and true understanding about software.
And perhaps top management needs also someone with a good sense about design. Many of them seem think they're Steve Jobs... Their failing tends to always be very consumer oriented (meaning they're not makers, maybe they're just using nicely designed products) and shallow understanding of the problem and especially possibility / innovation space.
Samsung, our new Nokia. I wonder if next chapters play out likewise.
And even that wasn't anything to write home about -- though they did experiment with nicer cameras...
I think Asphalt was the game chosen to demo it.
Had chosen something else most likely OpenGL ES would never had taken off, given how lousy it was supported across mobiles back then.
I had the N82 candybar model with a great camera and real xeon flash.
That said, Nokia had indeed some exceptional (for their era) devices, namely the Nokia Communicator.
The Finnish tech industry is still filled to the brim with ex-Nokia folk who simply do not understand what was better about the iPhone. Even today.
Some things were better about the iPhone, notably the UX, browsing and the app ecosystem which was starting to pick up (but was nowhere near what we have today).
Some thing were worse, and this is where many people seem to have developed selective memory issues. In particular the E72 didn't drop calls if one held it wrong, had a battery life at least double that of the iPhone and was less than half its price.
The N8 had a great camera and free offline maps. With Opera mobile it had a pretty damn good browsing experience. It was far from a complete dud.
The N9 could compete toe to toe with the 4S also on the UX, but by then it was too late. Nokia didn't have the foresight and guts to kill Symbian and bet the company on Maemo/Meego while they still had the possibility to build an ecosystem around it.
Apple invested all their effort into the iPhone and incrementally turned it from a good browsing device albeit average smartphone into a superb mobile computer while Nokia was starting and restarting four projects to compete with it.
Thanks to Opera? Mobile Safari on the first iPhone was the first browser that actually made sense and showed the web as you should.
Safari was impressive back then for sure, but feature-wise it's pretty bad even today.