Respawned perhaps.
Though it was actually mid 2000s that it really started to take off again, first with the ipod, then the iPhone.
Nokia really missed the boat on that one, they thought it was just an ipod with added phone, only teenagers will want one.
Yes and no.
Having both directly worked for, and as a supplier to, Nokia, would like to think I've a pretty close insight.
Nokia had the touch Series 90, launched a bunch of phones on it too:
With the 7710 Nokia has created a jack of all trades, but is it a master of any of them?
www.trustedreviews.com
Merging Series 60 and Series 90 was a mistake...
Nokia were pushing the idea of phones as pocket computers for a long time. I recall installing an app to turn the Nokia 7650 infra red sensor into a remote control in 2002.
The initial iPhone looked good but was a terrible phone. When it launched in 2007, it only did 2G, had shit battery life, a shit camera (it couldn't send picture messages anyway), terrible antenna and didn't install apps. It did have a capacitive screen though, which industry was very skeptical about. I did a test with a capacitive phone screen in 2005 and it was a complete car crash.
On the other side in 2007, the company I was working for at the time had a working 4G phone in R&D, and Nokia had the N95 with a cracking camera, 3.5G and decent battery life with plenty apps available.
Symbian was a dog to develop for. Nokia had a Linux option, Meego or Maemo, which was actually pretty good, launched in a few really good phones (e.g. N8/N9) and Jolla showed, by turning it into Sailfish, that it could be compatible with Android too.
And Apple got much better relatively quickly.
But then Stephen Elop set the whole lot on fire with his disaster of a move to Microsoft.
en.m.wikipedia.org
www.theguardian.com
www.businessinsider.com
www.phonearena.com
