Comment by speeder

I am Brazillian, and here this Nokia strategy was working just fine.

Android back then was crap, iPhone and Blackberry too expensive.

Symbian phones were spreading like wildfire in dry grass, people were switching from dumbphones to Symbian, and the community was having great growth, I saw children looking online for tutorials how to learn coding so they could make Symbian games, there was even a bootleg Counter-Strike for Symbian.

As soon the demo came out, Symbian sales tanked, and people switched instead to random cheap and crap Chinese phones, a popular one was "hiphone".

The effect in my view was devastating, all the hacking community that was starting, suddenly died, what proliferated now was poor quality phones or people doing crazy things (one waiter sold his kidneys to buy an iPhone, literally). Nokia had a very confortable first place in market share in Brazil, in a few months they had became irrelevant.

And now the effects are still felt, in Brazil it is hard to get a decent phone without going into debt, a lot of good phones with interesting features are not sold here, and you can't import them either, because the proliferation of chinese cheap phones that caused all sorts of trouble, the national regulator decided that they will ban from the cell towers any phone that they detect that doesn't have official permission to be sold in the country, this means there is no FairPhone in Brazil, no Shift phone, no Jolla, and so on.

And sadly, not even Nokia themselves are bothering with us anymore, they recently released some fairly interesting phones with WhatsAPP support using FireFox OS (KaiOS), and didn't bother asking permission to sell them here, so they can't be imported.