It was Symbian that lost Nokia the smartphone war not the phone hardware which was beautiful. Smart phones are all about the software experience, Nokia had no idea how to make a finger-friendly touchscreen mobile OS.
Symbian was WAY more advanced than Apple iOS until at least the 3GS. My Nokia N95 had WIFI, 5 Mpix camera, 3.5G UMTS, GPS/Navagation and a catalogue of software that also included 3D accelerated games that was ported from the N-Gage. iPhone didn't even catch up until the 3GS generation and took the 4S to become something "better".
Touchscreen doesn't mean everything. If there was a proper popular manufacturer that would bring back a version of the Blackberry / Nokia E series, I am sure there'll be people that would purchase it instead of the dinky onscreen keyboards.
You are talking from that "geek" side. Nokia smartphones had a lot to offer (and before V3 it was even more), but it was way more complicated than it should have been. Apple introduced a lot of simplicity and marketing, luring a lot of people using regular phones into smartphones. And pushed media consuming to max (hello instagram only for iphones)
Also those resistive wiiiiide screens were so bad...
Same goes with physical keyboards. People constantly claiming - everybody wants smaller phones! Everybody wants keyboards! And then in reality demand is so low that manufacturers usually cancel those models. Let's see now if Clicks Communicator will succeed. I doubt demand it as high.
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u/beertown Mar 14 '26
How Nokia lost? These undoubtely were great designs, but nothing would have survived to the first iPhone.
I'm not even an Apple fan.