Exacty. The Lumia 925 was so fucking good, and streets ahead of competitors, especially for the price. The camera on that phone made pics that is still better than some phone cameras today, from models that cost double or more!

I was always in the Android camp because it was more FOSS then, more AOSP. Being said that, another competitor was and is desperately needed. When Windows Phones were in the wild, I had hope. But take a look at Windows 11, if Windows Phone had been a success, by now it would be utter shit.

It was a better UI and user experience then Android by the time it launched....but by the time it launched the smartphone market had already exploded and the app developer marketplace had already matured into a profitable sector. There was no incentive to attract enough developers to build out a similar ecosystem on the late to the party Windows Phone

I've been running Launcher 10 on Android for a long while now. Replicates the tile interface and app list/drawer. I think it has ads with an IAP to disable them and another IAP for Live Tiles support.

Nokia should have continued developing the Linux Qt system maemo/meego. I was working with it as subcontractor in Nokia, and it was awesome. The Qt/C++ was really fast to code, and you could basically port KDE apps into it with small effort.

If they would have continued with it, we could have had three major OS in phones.

I was leading architect in internal UI design tools, and the tools had features that android/apple toolsets not even now have. Mainly because you could run the Qt app with PC hardware without any emulation.

I always find it amazing when you hear these insights into the downfall of once huge companies. It's incredible how terrible some people's judgement can be and a lot of these successful people are riding on luck rather than intelligence it seems

It ended up being a bad call but at the time Android only had 2 years in the market and trusting the leading OS company to manufacture a proper mobile product wasn’t a crazy idea. Microsoft just completely mismanaged the whole phone thing and took down Nokia with it.

If I remember correctly the approach was so anti-google that you couldn’t even watch youtube on Windows Phones.

Analysts are all about "product differentiation". Everyone was Android, so the way to differentiate themselves was to go with windows.

yea it wasnt all done by microsoft, plenty of idiots high up at the company itself were doing dumb decisions from ngage to microsoft phone

This may have been the purpose all along.

Japan too. The U.S. Congress threatened Japan with a trade war if they didn't shutter their TRON project to create a domestic Unix. Nowadays it's almost entirely Windows, and Japan has stagnated in terms of technology. They might have another chance at it with the world searching for an alternative to Taiwan for semiconductors and the potential legal status of AI training in Japan.

I haven't. The n9 with meego was amazing. The n900 too but I'm still sour thinking how great meego would be now instead of android.

It wasn't really Microsoft that killed Nokia's cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. "Oh, trust us, we're the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what's best for the market". They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they'll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)

To be fair I think Nokia was already one foot in the grave before the M$ deal. Largely thanks to Mr. Ollila.

Not a Nokia and I can't find that exact model but it seems there were a couple of weird round phones floating around in the early to mid 2000's:

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/c800

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/xelibri-6

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/panasonic-g70

There were some other weird as hell designs around that period, like the ones in this article:

https://medium.com/@samworldpeace/nokia-made-some-of-the-weirdest-phones-ever-a7e3412fa0c0

I recognise all but one of the phones in that link. The time just before smartphones was a weird moment in mobile phone history.