Comment by yencabulator

My company back then did some NDA'd research prototype work for Nokia about Linux and touchscreens. My personal conspiracy theory always was that they had tied the company so strongly to Symbian that they just couldn't announce anything else. I hypothesized that they only got some big companies on board Symbian by promising to be "exclusively Symbian for X years" -- and the X ended up being too long, the industry moved on before they could move off of Symbian. Or they were just too afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

They had everything they needed to run Linux on (some of) their phones quite early on. Battery life might not have been great, but they had plenty of Linux-running mobile hardware around, kept in bags outside of the building.