"Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now."
So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.
By the time the N900 came out Nokia had already lost to iPhones and Androids. It's predecessor devices were neat but they weren't phones, the N800 was a weird little pocket-sized tablet. Usability of the whole series was underwhelming.
"Lost" to iPhones? Sure. Lost to Android? A lot harder call. Certainly Apple partisans of the time were still in full Android-dismissal mode. That was 2009; what if they'd stuck with it and kept improving it? No guarantees, but they at least would have had a seat at the table. Nokia spent some of the most formative years in this market not even sitting at the table while they waited for their Windows phone to come out.
Plus given the Linux base at the core of both Android and Maemo, had there been more resources put into it, it seems like there's a reasonable chance they could have been in a position to come to some sort of accommodation with Android, perhaps being able to run some apps, or at least making it easy to target both.
I agree. My N9 is a pleasure to use and it feels like MeeGo could've been an actual competitor had it not been mired in the internal battle with Symbian.
I belong to one of the non-US markets where Nokia smartphones and dumbphones had a majority share. To be honest, abandoning Symbian was quite a shock here because, despite being slow, it was a very familiar user interface for vast majority of the population.
Rather than throw the baby with the bathwater, Nokia could retained a very loyal customer base by offering a smoother migration path. They could have even made an entirely rewritten touch based OS with a familiar Nokia UI (or as a fallback mode). It would have been a killer product in such markets. Instead Elop chose to write-off all the good work Nokia has done thus far by calling it a "burning platform".
Whichever numbers you look at today, the sheer stupidity of that decision is painfully evident.
So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.