I don't think "phasing out" Symbian earlier would habe been better.
I thought it was quite a good strategy to develop on Qt for Symbian as well as Maemo/Meego.
I am not an app developer, but from what I understand it would have made transition form Symbian to Meego quite easy.
At that time there wer many (many many...) more Symbian developers than Android developers.

More important:
The reason for Nokia failing was not that they were not able to technically compete with the stripped-down and restricted iPhone OS, let alone ugly-as-hell and buggy Android of that time.

There was a series of terribly stupid management decisions (like ditching advanced and touch- optimised S90 and UIQ to go for much simpler S60) leading to first problems until Elop came and deliberately killed Meego and Symbian (I can't beleive he was so stupid not to see that this was what he was doing with hist "burning platform memo", Delaying release of N9 and N8 and releasing N7 on the very day he announced that Nokia would be going Windows-only from that day on).

Some points in that article seem to completely overestimate iOS' and Android's capabilities in their first years of existance.

Apple was great at marketing, and Android was a niche product until Nokia killed Symbian and its designated successor so millions of people switched from Nokia to Android phones.

i do belive that maemo with some more development would actually wouldve been able of multi touch then again i am not a expert in this matter nor have i used a resistive touch screen with multiple touch points

Having a (even if GTK-based) device meant for nokia they would have had firepower to compete on par with (at the time) iphone.
Im not saying they should have stayed with GTK; qt could have come to Maemo just as much as it went to harmattan. Wonder if efforts to harmonize qt for symbian and maemo (instead of harmattan) could have been fruitful

I would add that Nokia didn't only embrace Qt, they actually bought Trolltech in June 2008 !
So it didn't come as a surprise to see them pushing it on all their platforms.

It was during this time that a major push of Qt towards mobile was done, with things like QML to more easily handle modern UI with multitouch capabilities.

You stand corrected : on all, except N900;
EDIT: I guess it made sense, considering N900 was single-touch.

Thanks. I don't own that device.

However, I can see at some place that Nokia released Qt for Maemo 5 (the one that runs on the N900 if I am correct). Not as the main UI toolkit (which only changed with Harmattan), but it was available and fully supported by Nokia (not a community port), according to those.
As an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo#Naming
"Maemo 5 : 25 October 2010 : PR1.3, Qt 4.7.0, full OVI-Suite support, updated kernel with kexec patches for MeeGo, bug fixes."

Is that right ?

That's right. Obviously, Nokia thought Qt was the way to go.

This is actually not true. Qt 4.7 (the first version which had QML) was available on the N900 as well.

I know because I actually wrote an app that used it.

Well what a surprise; I was totally unaware of this! Thanks!
What else stopped them then to back Maemo? they had everything in place; except multitouch, which would have been added latest by 2010, putting them ahead / on par with iphone, and full integration via qt with symbian apps. I mean, w0t? The magnitude of this patatrac (to use a nice word) just grew exponentially; this had all the numbers to be a slam dunk and instead turned into a smelly turd that doesnt want to flush down the toilet!

Does this prove that Harmattan per se was redundant and that maemo could have made it just as much?
EDIT: by backing i mean "release more devices with maemo"

EDIT#2: from a different angle.

Could jolla have ditched harmattan in favour of Maemo, upgraded gtk to latest to get the multitouch, replaced QT 4.7 with 5.1 on top of it, integrated libhybris, and released a device?

Assuming it'd be doable (then again what is not nowadays), it could have potentially yield quite a good experience.

Cant stop but think now; I wonder what it'd take to get maemo to work with libhybris?

Playing the devil's advocate...

Symbian was born at the time when mobile phones were single purpose devices, running some proprietary firmware. Symbian brought something new to the table - compatibility! Developers could write an application that would work not only on Vendor1 ModelA, but also ModelB and, imagine that, Vendor2 ModelC and Vedor3 ModelD. It was new, it was exciting, it was something that both the vendors and the users welcomed with open arms.

However, by mid 2000s, it was showing its age and it was time to start planning for retirement.

Android did not offer anything new but it nevertheless offered something that Symbian did not: continuity. Everyone except some walking zombies in Nokia saw that Symbian was dead and everyone needed something that would offer a similar level of compatibility across a new generation of mobile devices. Android offered that.

iOS did not offer compatibility. It was, after all, a one vendor (actually, at that time, only one device) OS. But it was Apple and we all know that Apple is in a league of its own. And, although it did not offer compatibility with other vendors, it offered an excellent compatibility and integration with other devices from the same vendor. Something that everyone else can still only dream about.

Now, what does Maemo offer? A Linux command line. A big deal. Maybe for you and me but, hand on heart, who else? How about anything else any self-respecting OS should offer? Where is compatibility? Diablo apps only run on Diablo devices, Fremantle on Fremantle. I do have Gnumeric, only available in the Diablo repository, running on my N900, but that is a rare exception and I had to jump through hoops to make it happen. Running an N9 app on N900 or vice-versa? Keep dreaming.

I hear a lot of excuses about different versions of Qt, GDK or whatnot. Frankly, I do not give a flying duck. Why should I? Android has managed to get over that. The old Android 2.3 phone I gave to my daughter to trash can still install apps from the same source as her tablet running Android 5.0. Sure, only a small subset of them but still. There is no equivalent single installation source for Maemo, MeeGo and now Sailfish, only fragmentation. With a big red sign saying, "Hands off, geeks only!" No wonder it was a flop. Elop did not cause it, he merely recognized it.