Posted by kjhughes 10/28/2025
Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?
Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.
The N900 was released more for a question of honour than anything.
However you have not read the links, not all models were alike.
> The Nokia 7710 is a mobile phone developed by Nokia and announced on 2 November 2004.[1] It was the first Nokia device with a touchscreen
This line of thought really needs to die.
The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop.
If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/31z13e/is_...
http://www.eedailynews.com/2010/05/android-vs-meego-two-appr...
Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia
"In 1998 alone, the company had sales revenue of $20 billion, making $2.6 billion profit. By 2000, Nokia employed over 55,000 people and had a market share of 30% in the mobile phone market, almost twice as large as its nearest competitor, Motorola."
The mobile phone business was ruined (perhaps they should have used Android), therefore caution about new foreign influence is warranted.
There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.