[pavlov]

Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.

That data point actually proves the exact opposite: Nokia knew how to sell mobile phones, but they had no idea how to create an ecosystem.

Despite Symbian's huge marketshare, the market for 3rd party Symbian apps was in shambles. There had been an initial enthusiasm for Symbian app development in 2002-2004, but that was slowly killed by Symbian's obtuse certification processes and SDKs that kept growing in complexity and crappiness.

When the iPhone was introduced, Nokia was marketing their Symbian phones with the slogan: "This is what computers have become." But almost nobody was doing computer-like things on Symbian phones. The browser sucked, even though it was WebKit-based (Nokia had forked the code and left it to linger). There was no channel for selling apps to ordinary consumers.

A few geeks installed weird stuff like Quake ports on their N95 phones, but the average Symbian user just did phone calls, SMS and occasional photos.