Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2].
But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia.
Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department.
At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.
... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple versions of bad software.
Apple is the only company in history to build consistently good hardware and good software and UI. Not IBM, not DEC or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX and one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century.
(I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)
And in all my years of using Nokia phones I can’t remember a software bug. But of course we wanted more from our phones than just stability, we wanted features and better UI.