The only way you could say Symbian was an abject failure is by comparing it to Android or iOS. Before those two systems came out, Symbian was the best mobile OS

The only way you could say Symbian was an abject failure is by comparing it to Android or iOS. Before those two systems came out, Symbian was the best mobile OS that was available. I agree that Nokia is better at hardware than software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call Symbian a complete failure. It served its purpose at its time and did it well. [My old N70 with S60 from years ago ran a python interpreter on it. Can iOS do that? :) ] It's biggest issue was probably fragmentation. There were too many releases - Symbian 3, 1st Edition, Symbian 2, 3rd Edition etc... That made it difficult to write software that could target more than a handful of the latest models. And with so many models available, the audience you reached was significantly less.