They innovated away privacy and security by relying on the human poor ability of impulse control and hardship with delayed gratification. Basically they made everything shiny and addictive. Is that really innovative? Perhaps 'bad' ui is better when you consider higher order consequences as opposed to concentrating only on first order popularity contest?
I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. Just noting how our contemporary value system where, "it makes money"="it's good" is short sighted at times.
Except they weren't. At the time, the US had really crap phones compared to Europe (which itself was behind Japan). The Nokia N95 could do everything. The original iPhone was pretty much laughed at by Nokia insiders because it lacked so many features. It turns out most users didn't care about most of these (MMS, DTV, Bluetooth)
Dismissal of what?
I'm not saying symbian was a better os. I'm saying sometimes innovation and commercial success are not indicators of better solutions. And sometimes moving fast and breaking/distrupting things, is not a good thing.
Android won because it is free beer that the OEMs don't have to pay anyone for licenses, save on development costs and can stick to outdated versions as long as they feel like it.
They were making massive efforts internally to get rid of the Series60 UI, which was not pretty visually or API-wise. The last UI before the platform was dropped UI was Belle, which actually wasn't bad.
Nokia actually had a touchscreen UI called Series90 but that went nowhere, they dismissed touchscreens completely initially, and then went with resistive touchscreens on the disastrous N97
I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. Just noting how our contemporary value system where, "it makes money"="it's good" is short sighted at times.