Nokia really could have had a much stronger performance in the smartphone market if they had followed the right path; their market share lead during the peak of Symbian's performance was demonstration of what could have been. A notable thing is that Symbian itself might have acquired somewhat of a bad reputation in the last few years, but it was technically superior to both Android and iOS (in the latter case, far superior - for example, iOS took several years and a few iPhone generations to get copy-and-paste, which Symbian had before it was even named Symbian).
It didn't adapt well to touchscreen phones, but then, it wasn't designed for them; there are several things about Symbian which I have identified, being the current owner of a Nokia E71 running S60, that show the dependency on hardware buttons. Unfortunately, there was a complete shift to capacitative touchscreens with only the bare minimum of hardware buttons - something I think was a deeply unsatisfying move.
However, there are several ways in which Nokia could have improved their fortunes and potentially still be competitive:
- Prevent the fragmentation of S60 between the 2nd and 3rd Editions. This would give Symbian quite a substantial advantage in the early days of the "app wars", when iPhone OS and Android were only getting their app markets started.
- Push the earlier adoption of smartphones in markets other than the business market. While in OTL, Nokia did try this to some extent with phones like the N-Gage and some of the Nseries phones, I don't feel they did enough. The problems with the N-Gage experiment are manifold, but one of the biggest problems was trying to compete directly in the handheld games console market, which meant competing with Nintendo - rarely a good strategy.
In any circumstance, if they'd dropped the N-Gage idea and pushed their superior camera quality and made more of the multimedia potential of their phones, they could have had a stronger market share back when hardware buttons were in vogue. This would have meant a bigger trend for the early touchscreen phones to overcome, and even in the case that touchscreens in this ATL became as big as they have in OTL, it gives Nokia much-needed breathing space to conceive new ideas instead of fighting off the back foot.
- Realise that Symbian was a dead end after S60. Notoriously difficult to develop for versus the Unix underpinnings of iOS or the Java basis of Android, it did not engender much praise from developers. Nokia did do this - eventually - in OTL, but they went for what I consider to have been the worst potential replacement. Android would have been a superior choice, even if it had meant competing with Samsung and HTC; Maemo would have been an even better choice.
It's difficult for me to describe exactly how disappointed I was when I realised that Nokia wouldn't be replacing Symbian with Maemo, and it's almost as difficult to describe how far ahead Maemo is in a technical sense than iOS or Android. While iOS or Android users take pride in their seas of mediocre apps, Maemo - being a proper Linux - was able (if not particularly competent) to run things like full-fat Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
More importantly, while iOS still has a crippled multitasking model for user applications (even though it's a Unix, which has had multitasking since 1969), Maemo has proper multitasking. And the potential for a swap disc, so memory consumption doesn't become a pressing problem. Oh, and you don't need grossly overweight development platforms to program for Maemo; indeed, if you're masochistic enough, you could even do your development directly on the phone itself. Oh, and the Raspberry Pi has already demonstrated that a small device with memory limitations can still be a viable development platform of sorts, so it's not like we haven't seen the precedent in OTL.
Actually, Nokia, what the hell were you thinking when you didn't go with that? I could have had Emacs on my phone, and you gave that capability up for Windows Phone!
