I worked at Nokia Research and later Nokia Maps between 2005 and 2012. During that time they went from having just launched a few Symbian devices a few years before I joined in 2002 to basically selling out to MS shortly after I left.<p>The whole Apple and Android thing did not catch Nokia by surprise. It was well aware what was happening. The problem wasn't awareness but a generally dismissive attitude of what was happening outside of Nokia. All this was discussed at length internally.<p>If you look at the history of Symbian, you can see that it overlaps with the history of Linux. Linux emerged as a hobby project in the early nineties. By 1998 there were some companies building embedded products with it. 1999 saw the likes of IBM pumping billions in Linux and things were really taking off. By the time the first Symbian devices hit the market, there had been a few attempts at Linux on mobile already. Around the time Nokia got serious about shipping S60 in volume (around 2005/2006 with a broader range of devices), Google bought Android and started working on getting that to market. Rumors about Apple doing something in this space were also getting pretty substantial around that time.<p>The critical mistake that Nokia made was dismissing Linux early on in favor of Symbian, a technically obsolete, 32 bit OS that would struggle catching up right until the end. Not all of Nokia of course. Just the senior management. Nokia did actually launch a linux based internet tablet in 2005 (the N770). The only thing stopping a phone project based on that was management. They pushed back on that until 2010. By which time they were loosing the phone market to Apple and Google in a big way. They lost about five-six years chasing their tails trying to push Symbian + S60 as the competitive phone OS it never was. By 2011, windows phone was a thing. by 2013 MS took over the phone division and they pulled the plug on the whole business unit in 2014.<p>Between 1998 and 2005, mobile Linux started happening and Symbian was struggling to compete. Nokia had no touch screen UI for it. Well, it did (S90) but they killed that only to resurrect a new touch screen capable platform on top of S60 a few years later in response to the iphone, which launched in 2007 followed by Android a year later. Ironically Android was depending on a lot of Linux contributions by Nokia. Nokia was actually one of the top contributors. And Google made full use of that. Early Android booted on the N800 before there were any Nexus phones to play with. That's how similar the kernels were between Android and Maemo/Meego.