yeah but they refused to integrate with carrier crapware or otherwise customize it in any way to suit the carrier. iOS was iOS and that was it. This seems trivial now, but at the time it was new - most phones would be sold with carrier-tailored operating system and apps, which made it difficult to build anything on multiple devices.
Did you actually do it...? J2ME was a nightmare of incompatibilities. You could basically use it only for games, because you took control of the whole shebang. The slightest attempt at integration with platform services or native widgets brought utter pain across devices.
Symbian also changed drastically from featurephone to featurephone. WinCE was a bit more consistent but nobody used it on actual phones, it was largely a PDA os and PDAs were a very small market.
You must have few hairs left then :) I worked a bit on j2me on Nokia and ran away very quickly. Cross-device testing was a massive (and expensive) issue. Definitely it was not comparable with the ease enjoyed on iOS today, where there are very few devices and the emulator is enough most of the time.
The only hair I lost on those days were caused by Symbian C++ and the multiple reboots on the development environment, from Metrowerks all the way into the burning platforms memo.
