Anyone saying Nokia is doomed is an idiot of the highest order.
Have you been living under a rock? or just not reading US biased tech blogs and forums? There seems to be lots of idiots of the highest order.
On the other hand there's certainly a case to be made that unless they get their act together right now in the smartphone sector they're going to end up dominating the low end and feature phone market with virtually no presence at all in the higher end market. Just look at the N97 for proof of how quickly things can change...
The N97 was/is ok - not brilliant, but ok. It suffered Nokia's typical first release firmware syndrome. They've largely fixed most of the issues now in the firmware. It could do with some more RAM but you know what, so could the iPhone and most Android phones.
I agree about them dominating the 'low end' although I can still do things on a 'low end' £65 PAYG Nokia 5230 that I can't do on an iPhone so I'm not sure that going by price alone justifies what is 'high end'.
Expensive ? Ain't nothing expensive about the iPhone. It's mid-range if anything. Blackberry, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia all ship phones that are as expensive as Apple. The iPhone is in the same price range as other smartphones.
Nokia's most expensive 'phone' is the N900 at £479 inc VAT unlocked. Most of their smartphones are in the £100 to £300 range unlocked. The 5800 for instance is £300 and the new X6 is £299 (16GB).
iPhones in the UK start at £349 for the crappy 3G model and rise to £549. And those are LOCKED to a carrier. O2 ask for £15 to unlock but will remove the free internet allowance even if you stay with them and Orange £20 after 3 months on PAYG.
If you want a locked Nokia 5230 smartphone, you can get those for about £65 from the Carphone Warehouse and you'll get free sat nav, push email and OTA sync/updates plus you can use VoIP on a 5230.
On contracts, generally iPhones are more expensive than others. A Nokia 5230 can be had for free with a £10 contract for instance. Can't get an iPhone that cheap.
That is why there is the transition to Symbian^4, which:
* brings vastly improved UI
* easier development - QT framework with multi-platform development tools ( and you can currently code in a variety of languages, i.e., C++, Python etc - no restrictions, unlike some others ).
Those are the two really weak items of Symbian. The rest of Symbian is great - power management is efficient, as is multi-tasking. Unlike other OSes, Symbian is capable of running on lower speed processors, but yet, perform the same tasks as OSes running on faster processors.
Most of that is in Symbian^3 and the apps you develop using QT will run on S60 3rd Edition dating back to phones like the N95.
I agree though, that's been Symbian's problem. Nokia kept with their button biased S60 interface for too long and it dominated the OS instead of the much better touch based UIQ interface or even S80. The core OS is really strong for phones compared to bloated desktop OSs like Android or iPhoneOS that require expensive hardware just to run.
I think the other problem they have to address is 'Symbian Signed'. It's much more expensive to develop apps on Symbian because of the strict application signing process. Apple App store policy aside, it's much cheaper and easier to develop iPhone apps.
On the other hand, the free services Nokia includes with every smartphone are pretty good compared to Google and Apple. Nokia seem to be putting much more effort there recently. Ovi Maps navigation for free beats the crap out of Google Maps or TomTom.