1. You have a subjective view, and because of that you can’t see the image properly. I can see you live in US, but you should know that US image doesn’t match the image of the rest of the World. Only in China and India live almost half of the world population. Many of them doesn’t need/can’t afford smartphones. They just need cheap but durable phones. The same story is in 3rd world countries. Even in Europe (the most developed mobile market) there are millions of people that just want simple and cheap phones. So, dumb phones have high demands. You can try looking at (for example) just one Nokia dumb phone – 1100 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100). Yes, that’s 200 million sold. So, when the World becomes better place (more rich than poor people) – and that’s never, we could say “stop producing those dumb phones”. Until then – no. Btw, you should know that they produce a durable phone, with FM radio, flashlight and better GSM signal than most of the smartphones for just $20. Now about that quote: “NO company that makes dumbphones does smartphones well (not even motorola, sorry droid doesn’t)” – interestingly, again the US view of the situation. More interestingly Nokia was the pioneer of the smartphones in the same time when they had more than 40% of the mobile market (they still have almost 40%). Even today without competitive high end phones (this will end soon – Q4 2010) they’re still no. 1 smartphone company (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone).
2. Search how many phones Nokia announced this year. Count them, then compare it to numbers of earlier years. Today Nokia has C series, N series, X series, E series and should announce S series (exclusive). This is done so you can easily find yourself a phone that you want. C is classic, N is all-around (best models), X are multimedia phones (music oriented, for younger generation) and E is business line. C, X and E series will have 6 models each, N will have 2. S – uknown (1-2 probably). So that’s less number of phones than earlier and much better organized way of finding the right one for the customer.
3. You should expect more focus on US when Nokia releases MeeGo devices. You should see some progress in 2011.
8. Nokia is trying to establish contact with their customers (search OVI blog, WOM World) and this is a good way. Also there is many twitter accounts where customers can say their own opinion to Nokia. (ovi by nokia, nokia, etc.) Even on facebook they always ask or post something interesting. Developers – there are Maemo/MeeGo Summits for developers every year. That’s good too. The bad thing? Nokia will have to do much more to get huge amount of developers. OVI store will be almost empty in the beginning (for MeeGo and S^4) so they should even pay to the big players (like EA) to make some apps/games.
9. You said car navigation? engadget.com/2010/07/26/meego-becomes-infotainment-operating-system-of-choice-for-bmw-g/
10. Try looking at Nokia Beta Labs betalabs.nokia.com/ there is much more of that, you just don’t know about it.
12. N95 is an old device. 2006. If you can remember iPhone couldn’t send an image via bluetooth for the first two years. Newer Nokia devices have better support for those kind of stuff. Btw, you have to use some kind of software for your phone (if you want all kind of support for your phone). iPhone needs iTunes, but Nokia phones can be connected like USB mass storage – so media can be transferred without any software. For everything else (syncs, even sending messages from your computer, etc) you can use Nokia PC Suite, or Nokia OVI Suite.

Even with nokias PC Syncing software, you have two choices: Nokia PC Suite or Ovi PC Sync. Eventhough Ovi is the newer version, it lacks some features the older suite had so you have to use both on your computer. And to upgrade your firmware (and keep the PC software version up-to-date), there is yet another piece of software required. Its just annoying and too messy to keep up with everything. Things need to be simplified from the number of phones, to the tools/software that supports them, to finding apps easily in one place, and even the symbian OS (there are definitely things that are not very intuitive in the menus and basic things I need apps for like profile switching).

The focus on North America is also a big one. For the e71, I just finally got a firmware update after almost 2 years. This firmware has been available for the European and Asian version of the phones for a while. We are so behind, that we actualy seemed to have skipped over 3 or 4 firmware versions completely in the NAM version of the phone. I went from 1xx.xx to 410.xxx, skipping over all 2.x and 3.x versions released.