“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”

In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.

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Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.

Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.

But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.

For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.