The original BOM target for Meltemi phone is more than $50, then at some point (forget when...) The team were ordered to work within $50 budget. I get the feeling this caused delays maybe due to HW changes. Delay is a big problem because original target is demo in Q2. But in early June, stable release shifted to Q4 and product launch became Q1 2013.

There was one important milestone coming soon. I feel what happened was top management had a serious discussion about the project's progress. They realized they could not meet the milestone, and was off by a larger than acceptable time by CEO/CFO so they made the call. Anyway, we won't know the true story unless senior management speak out... there must be other aspects of the story.

To me, the situation is more like Meltemi loses it, rather than S40 touch wins it. S40 touch is nice considering the price, but that also means NOK makes little profit out of it. In any case, NOK misjudged the market, mixed-and-matched a wrong strategy. Without the halo effect from N9x, the nice S40 touch interface cannot lift the image of S40 (think about the difference between an Audi A3 and a Golf), and Meltemi has to start from scratch....