It is a far more complex story than that.

Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.

There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.

The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.

So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.

Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.

Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.

And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.

But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.

It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.

It could have gone very differently.

Apples ability to force flat-fee internet was crucial. Nokia had to customise every phone for about 1000 operators because as you say the operators had the "whip hand." It probably fell apart because of converting to a "matrix" organisation which essentially assumed that there would be 100s of different models to fit in various price segments. This made it impossible to achieve the kind of experience that could be achieved by concentrating on 1 expensive model.

Nokia was into making affordable phones but there was obviously a point where the ARM chips suddenly got a lot better and it was so optimised around squeezing performance from slow chips that it couldn't adapt. The management was aging and had become very hierarchical.

Despite all of this we were beginning to get somewhere at the end - standardising on Qt and my project got the build times under some control. Then Elop f*ked us. It was fine for the shareholders because Microsoft took the big hit for them but it was shitty for us developers who were trying to get things turned around.

>from how handsets could interact with their network

Yes? Imagine millions of devices spamming your radio and core network to death?

>because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.

? The performance just want not there until 4G LTE came around. You could only push 2G and 3G so much. 2G was built for voice, data was bolt-on. Just physics. If you have another brilliant idea on how to solve that please comment.