I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.
Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist.
You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.
Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.