Was it bad enough to abandon all investments made into its development and jump to the less successful competing platform instead of incrementally improving MeeGo/Maemo?
Yes. It suffered from the same problem as all of Nokia's home grown software. The performance was shockingly bad - in an era of jelly scrolling, it was still using janky scroll-bars.
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
The N8 wasn't their last hurrah with Symbian, far from it. There was a massive difference in usability between that and the later Symbian Belle releases, and they were on a pretty rapid upward trajectory. Those last versions never reached the N8 (not enough memory?) but later Symbian models like my 700 did get them.
Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)
I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.
The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.
