alt Hacker NewsWith all possible love for Symbian, but no.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
The 5800/5230/5530 were probably the best value touchscreen phones of the time, considering that their screens had higher DPI than the first three iPhones and they all had similar web browsers.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.