Prior to the iPhone changing how phones were sold-- carriers meddled with everything so they could get their hands in media playback, app sales, feature upgrades etc. I don't think much has changed in this where anyone gives them an inch (which is nearly everyone but Apple).
Note: I worked for T-Mobile for four years prior and a little after the originals iphone came out.
The iPhone brought a bit of the outside world to the US telco market. This was only a matter of time, as the market becomes more globalized there is increasing competition in the consumer market, and carrier bound phones are less flexible and more expensive in the long run. Everybody knows this.
(I believe that even the US broadband market sooner or later will transformed in much the same way. For a long time it looked like Google was about to do it, but with that seemingly stalled for the time being we might have to wait a few more years.)
It is not reasonable to describe the iPhone as changing how phones were sold outside of a select few countries. Therefore we should not accept that explanation as to why Android phones do not receieve updates either. Those markets are small on a global scale, especially for Android which clearly dominates the lower end of the market, which is predominantly deregulated.
You would walk in, and find a wall of phones, alongside a list of carrier plans.
Then you could pretty much mix and match plan and phone to find some price you were comfortable with.
Come the iPhone's "worldwide" launch however Apple sat down and insisted that only one carrier would get the iPhone, and defined in detail the kinds of plans that said carrier could offer.
There is absolutely no reason for carriers to need to do anything at all, else it would not make sense that I can change the SIM card out and voila I’m on a new carrier. The manufacturer is the one doing the testing, and the carrier simply provides the infrastructure.
I feel US perhaps has a different experience, because of their ridiculous CDMA infrastructure. Is it Verizon or what, where it’s not a SIM card but the phone itself that’s setup to a specific carrier?
It was done via the desktop application to manage the phone.
However one would ususally only get bug fixes on the Series 30 and 40.
On Symbian towards the end of it, there were some OS updates still, but usually only once.
And Nokia was not alone, my Sony Ericsson C702 were capable of being getting new firmware OTA as well.
Keep in mind that this was back with the original iPhone that needed to be wired to a computer with iTunes installed.
Frankly the iPhone introduction feels more of a rollback than a upgrade from non-American point of view.
In particular when Nokia tried to introduce SIP support.
I'm pretty sure I got an actual update at least once.
Both Nokia and Sony Ericsson were doing OTA firmware updates at that point, for "featurephones" no less.
iPhone didn't get that ability until iOS5, in 2011.
