Nokia may have had an opportunity; however, you may not remember history, but the iPhone 1 was a game changer, and one thing that Android did right was to immediately adapt to the new form factor. Android won its place in the duopoly because it was and still is technically excellent, it adapted faster, and because it was immediately available to use by phone makers, borrowing many good lessons from Windows.
The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.
I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.
Nokia had a device on the market, the 770, before iPhone 1 release, and launched a successor, the 800 around the same time. However, for internal political reasons the devices didn’t have a GSM chip. The 800 was comparable to the iPhone: the touchscreen was much worse, but had a keyboard and could multitask.
So, from the technical standpoint they could have adapted much faster. However, the Maemo team didn’t stand a chance against allpowerful Symbian internally. The team was tiny (50ish people on the software side if I recall correctly?), wasn’t given neither the resources nor the goahead to try and build the smartphone on the platform.
It took years for the executive to realize Symbian’s not going to cut it and devote more resources to Maemo. Finally, with the launch of N900 Nokia two years later had a capable horse in the race.
It promptly went to kneecap it by announcing, in the same announcement speech that introduced the N900, that the platform is obsolete and the new version will use a different platform (qt instead of gtk, rh instead of deb, etc etc). It was the worst ever act of self sabotage I have ever seen and to this day I don’t believe it wasn’t a malicious act by some executives, nobody could be that stupid.
Anyways, Nokia proceeded to rewrite the entire platform, tied up with Intel in the process, and just wasted time until Elop told everyone to jump off.
In 2007-2008 Nokia stood a fighting chance, but internal power struggles, short sightedness and politics killed it.
The N800 was actually before the iPhone too, I know since I had it. This meant I wasn't as impressed by the IPhone as others, but I failed to appreciate the strength of the iPhone too. N800 had a resistive screen and a pen. It had a quite cumbersome interface and was more fragile. Also, it wasn't a phone. But I used it like I use my smartphone today.
As ex-Nokia, it was a game changer in the US market where Symbian didn't had much luck in the market.
Symbian development community wasn't that happy with Windows on Nokia phones, that is why most pivoted into Android and iOS.
Nokia was mostly an anti-Microsot culture shop when I joined in 2004, we had HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian. Windows was only used as thin client.
Only thing to add that it was funny how Blackberry didn't get for years that the browser is so important in the phones. Others missed that as well, everyone was doing the stupid half-browser thing. Of course they did as a normal browser needed a level up from their hardwares to be a PC leauge player.
This would have maybe delayed the inevitable though for some years anyway, just sayin.
Blackberry did eventually get their act together, but it was too late. There was a Blackberry KEY2 phone based on Android, with a valiant effort to sandbox Android/Google with Blackberry security policy controls. That phone belongs in a museum of adversarial interoperability, alongside Godzilla/Kong memes.
We need more devices with runtime competition between tech titans. Some is visible on iOS with Apple v. Facebook on ad targeting and contact databases.
Blackberry was primarily a corporate vendor, their phones were geared for email and Exchange server support, not end users, and their corporate users presumably weren't surfing the internet on their phones regularly. By the time of the iPhone, these features were available to the consumer market as well and it was no longer a unique advantage for them.
The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.
I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.