Even the N8 was comparable to the android I have today after 14 years. Full touch screen, great battery life, excellent camera quality, great maps, regular OS updates, ran all the software it had smoothly and could be programmed in C++ with Qt Creator.
Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.
Now imagine the Symbian community, with its anti Windows CE/Pocket PC bias, shortly after doing the whole set of transitions with Caride, Qt Creator, PIPS, being told that after all that transition work, they had to throw everything away and code for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight and XNA in C#.
Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.