Out in the rest of the world, Nokia Symbian phones were the leading smartphone platform. In the US, almost nobody knew they existed.
This is a hot take if I've ever seen one. Completely ignoring the launch of the iphone in 2007 which coincided with their downfall. We could say yeah, maybe they didn't partner with CDMA and all the weird V-cast shit Verizon was doing and that hurt their market share like crazy, but to say SIP was the dealbreaker, just lol.
Also, Android shipped a native SIP client until this decade: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-killing-native-sip...
Having 10% in the US with 40% globally is a major problem. Tech journalism sells products and tech journalism is focused on the US market.
Here's a blog [2] reposting a no longer available article on smart phone marketshare in 2006. It points out that symbian was dominant worldwide, but only had 10% of market share in the US.
This is why this article says Americans might not know of Nokia. They were once a major vendor in the US, but US sales have been low since at least 2006. Symbian market share continued to grow worldwide after the release of the iPhone, but not in the US where it finished disappearing.
Of course, Nokia dropping CDMA in 2006 [3] and never releasing a Symbian CDMA phone doesn't help when half of the US was using CDMA.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563633/2007-was-a-blo...
[2] https://mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/smartphone-os-m...
[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/182913/sync_symbian.html