And the iPhone is still around, whereas Symbian isn't.
Possibly proving that iOS (and the hardware it runs on) was what consumers wanted in the mid-2000's and onward?
Possibly proving that iOS (and the hardware it runs on) was what consumers wanted in the mid-2000's and onward?
https://insights.dice.com/2013/09/25/a-timely-revision-of-el...
Symbian with Qt was already on the right path to win the hearts of many developers.
iOS and Android wiped the floor with Symbian and BB in terms of ease-of-use.
"..the inscrutable difficulty of navigating menus on Nokia's Symbian phones": https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/10/how-apples-iphone...
I worked at Nokia's R&D facility in Ruoholahti briefly in 2011, so I got inducted into the inner sanctum of history regarding the phones.
Symbian was designed for very anemic hardware, there were very tight constraints it's a marvel that the thing ran on what it did. The iPhones first CPU was at least an order of magnitude (and then double it again) more powerful than what Symbian was designed on.
the iPhone, famously did not meet any of the internal tests at Nokia, no drop test, battery life tests nor usability tests for blind people passed at all.
Basically from all avenues it looked dead on arrival.
However, it was obviously _not_ dead on arrival, and so Nokia started looking at things from a "UX first" perspective, the engineering culture was still around though, so, not a major "product" team or graphics design team to be found on the floors of the R&D facility.
But they started this effort _after_ the iPhone had launched, and these projects take a long time.
That's what Maemo was. And it was later merged with Intels efforts and named MeeGo. And everyone who used that system seemed to really enjoy it.
It was, indeed, killed in its crib by Elop. Although to be truly fair, the iPhone and Android were very incumbent at that point.
Symbian was considered obsolete or deprecated internally, not for lack of very intelligent design, but because people seemed to care for things other than that Nokia had believed people cared for.
So, Nokia saw it as an inferior product?
Perhaps this is a problem in engineer-led companies - thinking that the phone with the most megapixels in its camera, or most wifi bands is the best?
Technical brilliance counts for nothing if consumers don't want the product. See also Windows Phone, Betamax, etc
Imagine if Nokia had continued investing in a linux phone, android wouldn't be what it is today.
Yes, the iPhone is the better smartphone than Symbian-based phones. But it wasn't the first, despite the market share today.