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Comment by davidkwast | Hacker News Reader

True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.

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Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.

Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X

Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.

Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.

Symbian did have some touch models in the end but they were very poor because they still used resistive touch and the UI was not well laid out for it.

X does not support touch natively. What it does support is mouse emulation from the touch input. This also greatly limits how good you can make it.

Symbian didn't use X in any way. That was Maemo, used on the 770. But there were also some Symbian-based touch devices like the 5800 XpressMusic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5800_XpressMusic

But Symbian didn't have any roots in Linux. It came from the Psion organiser line originally (and specifically the 5/7 series, not the earlier 3's).

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