[ACCount37]

Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism, and all of it is deserved.

Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.

Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.

[mjg59]

The N900 was never really intended to be a mass market device, more something to attract enthusiast excitement and serve as a reasonable developer platform - so in that respect it being kind of half assed isn't too much of a surprise. The problem was it taking another two years until the (in theory) mass-market hardware was ready and also there having been another basically pointless upheaval in dev experience (the shift from Maemo to Meego, which included changing packaging formats), and in that respect the experience was incredibly half assed.

[ACCount37]

Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were Nokia's first mass produced, mass market "iPhone killers", and they were half-assed responses at best.

Nokia N8 was their first device that was truly competitive with iPhone, and by then, the image of Nokia as a cutting edge smartphone brand was already in decline.

A lot of iPhone's edge, by then, wasn't just in the touch-native UX, but also in app support (developers! developers! developers!), and they had the mindshare advantage there.

Nokia N9 was even better in a vacuum - but was even more late to market, and had even worse app support.