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Comment by aceperry | Hacker News Reader

The Nokia name and brand reminds me of what happened to Blackberry. Former giants in the pre-smartphone era (Apple iPhone) that couldn't pivot to making successful smartphones. I know Microsoft has always had computerized phones, but they sucked and didn't have the wow factor of the iPhone. The iPhone's open app ecosystem (relatively, for its time) also seemed to have contributed to it's success.

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BlackBerry essentially killed itself in a few shorts years (basically 2007-2010) by not seriously reacting to iphone and android. I'm convinced if a blackberry 10 OS phone had come out in 2010 they might have held on to market share....but it wasn't released until early 2013...way to late.

Nokia made smart phones with browsers before iphone. It wasn't great, but they were on the smartphone thing from the start. Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone.

One thing was that iPhone SDK surely felt like heaven when compared to the clunky Symbian C++ one, which after three reboots still felt bad.

> Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone.

It's been like a decade since I had a Symbian phone (the only one I ever used), so maybe my memory is fuzzy, but didn't all applications have to be signed at great expense?

Sure, Apple does the same kind of thing with the App Store, but it's substantially cheaper and despite the known App Store woes probably a smoother process.

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