If you ever did, the business opportunity to build a mobile platform with any sort of half-sane API will immediately scream very loudly at your face - and that's exactly what Apple did with iOS. The rest is History.
A real sad story - the hardware was quite capable for the time.
It's easy now in hindsight to say they could have won the market with a software ecosystem but back then that was not clear for them.
It was clear for Apple since they had the experience monetizing the iTunes ecosystem and they were a software focused company.
I had to professionally code an image processing application for Symbian in 2008/9, and that's when I formed this opinion. Apple & Android seemed to agree :)
What's surprising is that there weren't more attempts at a sane mobile platform/API - and earlier.
Sure, you saw it, but Nokia management was out of touch and more preoccupied with the next quarter rather than with the next 3 years, as it the case in many large old companies.
For som reason the not-so-visionary mgmt decided to cut it, right when it should have started to scale up.
Nokia was still a hugely profitable company when they closed down the maemo/meego platform.
I think they all recognised the threat from Android/iOS at the time. Just that closing it down was a way to continue showing good profit margins.
I think it could have been the right platform at the right time, and I was very surprised they didn't at least give it an honest try.
It's all about leadership, vision, and courage. Leadership that doesn't push new boundaries, has no vision, and lacks the courage to try new risky things, are doomed, unless they are monopolies. Nokia didn't have the market power to succeed in a changing world with its lackluster leadership.