When they announced the move to Windows Phone, I thought it seemed like a good idea. Meego clearly wasn't ready, Symbian was an antique, and Windows Phone was promising in so many ways -- even now I believe we will never see another smartphone OS as well-designed as Windows Phone 7.
Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed.
Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers. And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a while.
But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill.
The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with Symbian and Meego.
I doubt it. Symbian was held together with duct tape by that point. They managed to make some things sort of work in the short term through heroic engineering efforts but it was clearly unsustainable. There were fundamental limits which couldn't be fixed without seriously breaking backward compatibility.
Didn't own one but a friend had an N900. It seemed like a few things still needed polish, but it didn't seem slow to me - quite the opposite. He hung on to it for a good while too.
My plan was to buy the next one at next contract change - of course that wasn't going to be possible. (I've always had a liking for the Communicator layout, going all the way back to Psion 3s)
I had a Nokia N810 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810). It was a incredibly good device for the time and left other smart devices of its era in the dust, IMO. The lack of telephony is why I stopped using it but its functionality, perfect keyboard, superb browser, and a proper terminal made it something that I still remember very fondly, next to my Sharp Zaurus SL500.
I don't have experience with Maemo, but Meego was not particularly slow or awkward beyond being a young, immature mobile OS. In fact my N9 was remarkably stable considering the circumstances of its birth. And in fact I know several non-tech people who really liked their N9's, minimal ecosystem notwithstanding, so it had potential beyond a hardcore geek audience.
Was it bad enough to abandon all investments made into its development and jump to the less successful competing platform instead of incrementally improving MeeGo/Maemo?
Yes. It suffered from the same problem as all of Nokia's home grown software. The performance was shockingly bad - in an era of jelly scrolling, it was still using janky scroll-bars.
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
The N8 wasn't their last hurrah with Symbian, far from it. There was a massive difference in usability between that and the later Symbian Belle releases, and they were on a pretty rapid upward trajectory. Those last versions never reached the N8 (not enough memory?) but later Symbian models like my 700 did get them.
Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)
I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.
The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.
