Can Nokia Recapture Its Glory Days?

Having a less painful development platform than Symbian and a better development environment than Symbian SDK/Carbide C++ combo would be a good start.

Last I checked, the emulator included with majority of SDKs is still a bloated monster that is very divergent in behaviour from the actual device.

They're pushing QT as the programming framework for future versions of Symbian. I haven't tried it, and I don't know to what extent you still need to engage with the eccentricities of the Symbian C++ environment (error handling, memory management, string classes, etc), but it can only be an improvement.

And it looks like they plan to retire the old emulator (which is actually more of a simulator - it's a reimplementation of parts of the OS to run natively on Windows rather than on the Symbian kernel). In its place will be a real CPU-level emulator based on qemu:

http://blog.symbian.org/2009/11/20/an-introduction-to-the-sy...

Finns are nothing if not stubborn. They'll figure it out sooner or later, but it's hard work steering a ship that size -- especially without strong leadership.

The one thing I can say is that love QT, the c++ framework they bought. I hope they succeed if only so QT improves and gains more platforms.