Comment by senko

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promptly went to kneecap it by announcing, in the same announcement speech that introduced the N900, that the platform is obsolete and the new version will use a different platform (qt instead of gtk, rh instead of deb, etc etc).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.

(when I say Nokia I mean the smartphone division)