Nokia lost the North American market before the iPhone. Here's an article that discusses Nokia's 40%+ market share globally and less than 10% share in North America in 2007. It's hard to find US specific numbers from then. 2007 is a bad year, because the iPhone was released mid year, but I can't find a 2006 US number.

Having 10% in the US with 40% globally is a major problem. Tech journalism sells products and tech journalism is focused on the US market.

Here's a blog [2] reposting a no longer available article on smart phone marketshare in 2006. It points out that symbian was dominant worldwide, but only had 10% of market share in the US.

This is why this article says Americans might not know of Nokia. They were once a major vendor in the US, but US sales have been low since at least 2006. Symbian market share continued to grow worldwide after the release of the iPhone, but not in the US where it finished disappearing.

Of course, Nokia dropping CDMA in 2006 [3] and never releasing a Symbian CDMA phone doesn't help when half of the US was using CDMA.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563633/2007-was-a-blo...

[2] https://mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/smartphone-os-m...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/182913/sync_symbian.html