“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” (Oscar Wilde)

"A smartphone!" (me)

Nokia top-notch phone customers have never been left really unsatisfied, because those devices are truly amazing, well built, feature rich and pleasant to at least three out of five senses; but, as you quoted above, a number of guys, including me, think that a higher level of satisfaction will never be pursued. And this, for a legitimate commercial purpose, which is the same of Oscar's cigarette-makers: make their business thrive.

You see, I am still sorely ruminating about the transition from the Nokia 9500 to the E90 Communicator. The 9500 had an excellent operating system (series 80) - you're an expert in this field so I don't need to explain more - but that was ditched in favour of a regression to a more primitive interface which needs more keypresses to get same results, drops copy/paste from browser (! this still calls for vengeance), word/excel compatibility, and lots of refinements which you'll able to remind going back to symbian-related forums of those times.

And this is my pet argument because I've been a Communicator addict; but I bet you have found similar complaints in all those people from AllAboutSymbian (was it AllAboutSeries80 once, didn't it? %^) that you quoted in your answer, for other phones.

IMHO you get a perfect phone when you go on refining and adding features to an already almost perfect phone, without losing the winning points, and that is evolution. Not when you abruptly abandon a well-functioning line and force your customers to a devolution, no matter how you try to hide it.
That is the thing I still hope won't happen with our tablets but is feared by many, here.

Come on, Nokia sells *hundreds* of models. They must have an exceptional ability in diversifying their assembling lines. They're already making phones for literaly every taste.
So why don't they do the perfect phone?

They are reasoning like Nokia maybe. But now comes the exception...

They have been in mobile phones for a time that's a fraction of that of Nokia, but they're learning.
And they're dangerously (for Nokia) getting close to the perfect phone. Their iterations are in the sense of evolution as I described above. They are not making a whole collection of models, each one lacking something (Oscar Wilde's perfect pleasure); they're building on a single model making it better and better. And the market seems to appreciate