[Zigurd]

Many years ago I was traveling with an Ericsson executive who knew exactly the opposite: Mobile networks and phones were how the developing world would connect to the internet's resources. I'm certain Nokia's leadership knew exactly the same thing. I am familiar enough with Nokia's early smartphones to know they held nothing back, even though, at the time, Series 40 was the mass-market device, Series 60, was high-end. Series 60 ran Symbian, a true smartphone OS with an app runtime, 3rd party SDK, and an app store. Even higher-end Nokia smartphones ran Maemo, a Linux-based smartphone OS that roughly resembled Android.

Nokia failed at smartphones because they were forced to abandon Maemo and Symbian in favor of Microsoft's under-baked smartphone OS and the generally disastrous "leadership" of Stephen Elop, and subsequently being bought by Microsoft to continue to try to make Windows Phone happen at the expense of everything that succeeded at Nokia.

[d3vmax]

Nokia was already failing prior to MS coming into the picture.

[Zigurd]

If Nokia was standing on a burning platform, Stephen Elop hosed them down with gasoline.

[johnyzee]

Yeah, Ericsson had a pretty slick touchscreen phone before the iPhone. The iPhone simply blew everything out of the water on both hardware and software.