[distances]

> Even strong and entrenched players like Palm, Nokia (with Tizen) and even BlackBerry could not hold.

What do you mean Nokia with Tizen? Tizen was Samsung's attempt at continuing with Linux after Nokia abandoned MeeGo.

Nokia was the massive smartphone market leader with Symbian, but was a hardware company at heart and couldn't keep up with Android which ate its lunch by giving all the competitors a free, competitive operating system.

Before Android came along the competition didn't really have much choice as they were even worse at software than Nokia was. Who knows, without Android the landscape might still today be Nokia & Apple sharing the market -- or maybe Windows Phone would've managed to become the second system.