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.