I have an n800 and n810 - the n810 is a thing of beauty in my opinion, even now. But there's no way they could compete with Apple or Google because Nokia designed phones that kept the operators happy and didn't step on any toes. Apple and Google didn't care about any of that.
Do we honestly think Nokia would have been able to compete in the same mobile OS space that not even Microsoft could carve out a space in?
I don’t think it’s a mistake that the only true competitor to Apple ended up being Google. At the time, they were the most competent big player in web-based software. The acquisition of Android and integration with Google services like search, navigation, gmail, etc. is a value-add that Nokia could never have matched.
Apple of course already had the value add of their entire ecosystem of computing and multimedia ecosystem (iPod, iTunes, etc).
Windows phone failed because its value-add didn’t actually have much value, unlike the Google and Apple ecosystems. It turns out nobody needs excel, PowerPoint, etc integration on their phone.
Nokia would have had even less value-add in the software space, given they had no software ecosystem at all!
Fans even somehow ported Valve's Counter-Strike to Symbian, along with a bunch of other games, it was really great.
Then when Elop memo came out, stores took Nokia phones out of the shelf, all of them, 2 months later their market share dropped from 68% to something like 30%'s or so, and next year instead the dominant market share was chinese shitty phones, like hiOS, android with google services removed, and so on. hiOS in particular was hilarious, a lot of people bought it thinking it was iOS from Apple (and to my surprise with a quick googling, hiOS is still a thing).
EDIT: just saw hiOS now is Android based, dunno where is information about old version, there was tons of hios phones here around 2011, thus preadating the 1.0 of current hios, that is from 2016.
At the time.. sure.
Symbian was great back then, and in many many countries, there were no large data plans back then, and a phone that needed to be online for a lot of the gimmicky features to work was not something a lot of people wanted or needed, because of data costs... app support was probably most important to people then.