With all possible love for Symbian, but no.

Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.

The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.

Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.

In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice

1. Battery runtime

2. Durability

3. Tactile user-input

just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.

For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.

Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.

That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.

Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.