[hnlmorg]

Nokia was already in decline before the iPhone came along. Sony Ericsson and Motorola, and to a lesser extent, Samsung, had supplanted Nokia as the fashionable handsets for consumers.

I think the iPhone more directly killed Palm and Blackberry. Also PDAs to an extent too.

[russellbeattie]

No, I worked at Nokia 2008-2012 and it was definitely not in decline. It had a near monopoly on high end phones when the iPhone launched. It took several years for its impact to be felt.

[hnlmorg]

That wasn’t my experience in the UK.

Sony Ericsson dominated the high end consumer phones. They supported Java games, Google Maps, could play MP3s, and so on and so forth. These feature phones weren’t nearly as advanced as the iPhone but this is pre-iPhone.

And BlackBerry dominated the business domain. With Palm and Windows CE taking some specific domains, eg where security was a greater concern.

The Motorola Razor (however it was spelt) was massive around your time of working at Nokia. Though granted that’s not high end.

There wasn’t really a bit smartphone market then. Largely because phone manufacturers were still figuring out how to make smart phones successful. Most businesses either went down the Blackberry route, or the PDA route. Nokia definitely dominated with Symbian handsets but that was such a small fraction of the overall high end and business devices in people’s hands that it’s hardly noteworthy.

At least that was the trends I saw in the UK. Maybe in parts of Europe Nokia had more popularity?

Edit, looking into this, it seems I’ve either been misremembering or lived in some kind of bubble.

Eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_...

My apologies for disagreeing with you.