My with my experience with Nokia was similar.
Journalist Lauri Malkavaara’s missive to Nokia stated that “I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have used the device now on a daily basis for over six months, and I have not even thought about any manuals. The logic of the device opens up right away. It is no wonder that it is a huge success all over the world.”
Malkavaara then went on to describe how difficult it was to figure out how to do just about anything on the Symbian phones that were being sold at the time, concluding with “By putting a telephone like the E51 onto the market, Nokia has squandered its most important legacies: to produce telephones in such a way that they are easy to use. This will cause problems for Nokia.”
Instead of listening and changing the design strategy for Symbian, Malkavaara says that “Nokia bosses started calling me, wanting to explain Nokia’s strategy.”
I once had a meeting with Nokia engineers about the Roofhopper, a mesh WiFi radio. I tried to suggest some improvements based on my experience with the radio and was told by the engineers that Nokia wasn’t interested in hearing from customers, they had designed the radio the way it was and that was that.
I knew right then that Nokia was doomed.
The Nokia N800 and N810 were (and to some extent, still are, if you can find them used) pretty good products.
I think they got clobbered by bad marketing on the part of Nokia and the growing smartphone market. The N900 was sort of an offshoot of the N8XX series with a phone, but I’ve never used one. (I did purchase a refurbed one a while back. It died within 24 hours. The vendor said he’d gotten 15 of them, and every one of them had died.)
Yep, hubris and ego are dooming them…