As for Nokia's designs... Meh! I've never owned one and if they were so awesome then people would be buying there phones but there not.
Uh, yeah they are. Nokia is selling Lumia 900's as fast as they can build them. Where have you been?
The only reason Nokia is in such rough shape overall sales-wise is that the Lumia still only represents a very small part of the overall sales of a very big company. Their other phones are declining in sales in large part due to the fact that fewer and fewer people want the dated Symbian OS that most of their phones still run.
Trust me, they're awesome. Have a look at the PureView 808. It's got hands down the best camera any smartphone has every had, by several orders of magnitude. It's a 41 MEGAPIXEL camera that downsizes the file but retains most of the quality. It takes better pictures than a lot of SLR's and easily destroys ANY camera phone out there. Unfortunately it too is hamstrung with the Symbian OS for now, but you can count on seeing the same technology in a Windows Phone before too long.
Nokia has a long history of good design and I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but the Korean junk makers just crank out plastic clones and they wouldn't know a creative or original thought if it fell on their heads like an anvil. All they know how to do is copy each other and everyone else and add a few more inches of screen here, a few more mhz there.
There is no "art" to anything they do. Every Korean and Chinese smartphone I've ever seen has about as much flavor as uncooked tofu.
If we lose Nokia, we'll all be using tofu phones. I really hope it doesn't come to that.