when real competition showed up, symbian was a goner.

N8 should have been one of those phones scrappped by Nokia. it really dented people's confidence in Nokias ability to produce competitive software

That was the n96 and n97 not the n8...The n8 with faster hardware and anna/belle from the outset could have got a much better response...Don't believe it? Check the number of "Top Apps" that Symbian had till Feb '11 that were on iOS and Android...

Boredom. I've had a symbian phone for 6, 7 years? I'm bored of it. Tired of that fat lump in my pocket, pulling my jeans off. Tired of how closed it is. Tired of the limitations. Tired of nonexistent apps for it.

Meego/Harmattan is sooooo many light years better in that respect, thanks to communities like this!

edited: saing that, i have used it faithfully, wth cfw, for 2 years. I had Belle months before most people did. I loved Belle, faithfully. Now i've fallen out of love with it all.

I will miss the camera though! (its in FInland at Nokia being repaired, so i can send it to my brother in the states)

the n97 mini was the worst phone ever. That shouldn't passed any quality checkpoints within nokia. they should have moved the dev teams to maemo and pushed out n900 and n900 2 instead

Honestly? Steve Jobs.

Most giant corporations today are run by money men. (It's tough to become a giant corporation without having the money men in charge.) The only problem with that is, to become an effective money man in the modern world, you've gotta pretty much devote yourself 24/7 to finance issues and salesmanship.

Apple is the anomaly -- they managed to choose a leader who wasn't a true money man. Jobs certainly had the cutthroat mentality to be one, but his true passion was always for design, not money. So where most giant companies will perform endless surveys and attempt to create products that the general population want, Apple ended up concentrating only on devices that Steve Jobs wanted. And, oddly enough, it survived long enough to actually produce a few of those devices.

As such, it was able to ignore trends, fads, criticism, and even basic logic and common sense in order to create a very small collection of very well-designed products. And so, the iPod with its five buttons was leaps and bounds ahead of any other MP3 player. The iPhone pretty much revolutionized the "smart phone" industry. And the iPad more or less created the modern tablet market segment all by itself.

That kind of innovation in design -- led directly from the top of the company -- is all too rare. Big companies will frequently experiment with radical concepts; Nokia's Internet Tablet series is a perfect example of this. But no true money man will bet the entire company on an unproven device; the risk/reward payoff just isn't worth it.

And you can see that today. Honestly, Android is more of a response to the iPhone than an innovative product in its own right. Nokia dropped Meego and went to bed with Microsoft because Microsoft appeared to be the less risky strategy. Everyone is reacting to the choices Apple has made; that's the way a money man works, by going to where the money is today, not by trying to create the world of tomorrow.

Without Jobs at the helm, I don't see Apple performing nearly as well in the future. Which is sad, because it probably means the return of the money men to power, and therefore more mediocre products. I've never agreed with Jobs' sense of design myself, but at least he had the guts to try something new. I just don't see that kind of corporate leadership anywhere else today...

This is a myth. The iPhone wasn't a smartphone when it was introduced (and I don't think it is one today). St. Jobs didn't revolutionize anything. All he did was make people pay more for a basic feature phone by calling it a smartphone... and then having the media go wild because this so-called smartphone was so much easier to use than other smartphones. Almost as easy as a feature phone... oh, yes, because that's what it was.

All lies, no revolution.

Who cares what it is. Feature phone smartphone feature phone. The important thing is what the user thinks. Jobs gave the world what they wanted, a phone with a big touchscreen, plus easy to use.

Absolutely right. And yet, wrong.

Yes, Apple has never invented anything! St. Jobs was not a researcher; his interest was always in using technology, not creating it. And yet, that is exactly why he is the revolutionary guy. All these other companies are always trying to push the boundaries by getting the absolute latest bleeding-edge technology into a package and shoving it out the door the same day. And people will go for that -- even if the design is shoddy, even if the device falls apart in less than a year, people do like to have the latest tech in their hands.

With Apple (at least until recently), you NEVER got the latest tech in your hands. It takes time to craft a quality device, for certain when dealing with the level of quality Jobs demanded. His emphasis on the user interface design, on the simplicity of the device, on the polished ecosystem behind the device, was leaps and bounds beyond what any other phone manufacturer was doing at the time.

The Jobs philosophy has Apple competing on a quality user experience, rather than on features or price. And that is the revolution. That is what keeps people buying Apple products again and again, even when they are more expensive and less powerful than the competition. And, unfortunately, that's also why every "smart phone" today looks like an iPhone; other companies are now trying to compete with Apple by trying to become Apple, which is dumb. We're ending up with iPhone knock-offs that are neither as polished as the iPhone, nor as technically sophisticated as the good old bleeding-edge phones used to be.

Trying to shoehorn the latest tech goodies into a package with a minimalist UI like iOS has is just a recipe for a mess...

Actually, Jobs just gave the world what Jobs wanted. It'd be nice to see some real iPhone alternatives out there, rather than just iPhone knock-offs...