[oriolid]

Just to clarify, which device did you have?

I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.

As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.

[edent]

I had the n810. See my contemporaneous thoughts at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2009/05/nitdroid-installing-android...

I also had the N8, their last hurrah with Symbian. Three years after the iPhone launch and they were so far behind it was embarrassing.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/10/n8-fail-reasons-why-the-nok...

[cannam]

The N8 wasn't their last hurrah with Symbian, far from it. There was a massive difference in usability between that and the later Symbian Belle releases, and they were on a pretty rapid upward trajectory. Those last versions never reached the N8 (not enough memory?) but later Symbian models like my 700 did get them.

Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)

I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.