[HN Gopher] The Nokia N900: the future that wasn't
___________________________________________________________________
The Nokia N900: the future that wasn't
Author : tate
Score : 233 points
Date : 2021-03-16 04:29 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.osnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.osnews.com)
| kkarimi wrote:
| Still my favourite device all these years later
| wmf wrote:
| Thom makes a really insightful point: "people who want a true
| Linux computer in their pocket". I wanted a more open iPhone and
| I hated the N900 because it was terrible as a smartphone. Between
| the stylus, unconstrained multitasking, desktop Firefox, and
| Flash it's like they were trying to prove Steve Jobs right. The
| G2 was so much better because it had an actual phone OS.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| What's wrong with unconstrained multitasking? I thought it
| worked well on the N900. I also think it works well on Android.
| bestouff wrote:
| On Android it's very constrained. Background apps are quickly
| killed to save battery, whereas on my N900 any running app
| which wouldn't stop by itself would drain it in a few
| minutes.
| sp332 wrote:
| Apps can't even reliably sync data on Android without using a
| special Google-hosted remote service that pings your phone
| when there is an update. Music apps have to register
| specially so they don't get killed in the background.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| Android is constrained in that sense, I agree. I thought
| the OP meant constrained like iPhones of the period were:
| No pretense of multitasking, every task switch being "close
| an app, open another one".
| regularfry wrote:
| I liked the stylus. More precise than a fingertip, which it
| wanted to be on a screen that small. Although you could use a
| fingernail too, in a pinch. People pointed at the resistive
| screen as evidence it wasn't as good as an iPhone, but the
| thing is that it was a _very, very good_ resistive screen. High
| resolution, accurate, and you didn 't need to mash it to get it
| to register.
| WildParser wrote:
| That keyboard was fantastic. I hope the PinePhone Keyboard will
| be able to reach this level.
| dkarl wrote:
| I owned one of the Nokia tablets, maybe the N770. I carried it
| everywhere with me for months, until I had to admit I just didn't
| want to use it. When something came up that required me to access
| my email or use the web, rather than pull out the Nokia, I would
| wait and do it at home if at all possible. (I didn't yet carry a
| laptop everywhere.)
|
| It's interesting now to think I had this with me 24/7 for months
| and it didn't change my life at all. Same with the Palm V I owned
| before it. All the exciting ideas were there in the zeitgeist
| (portable general purpose computer in my pocket! ubiquitous
| instant access to information!) but the technology couldn't
| realize them yet.
| nicklaf wrote:
| Heh. The N900 was an amazing device and I cherish the time I had
| with it.
|
| However, it's also a painful memory, because I managed to brick
| the device after spending possibly hundreds of hours customizing
| it.
|
| The first thing I did was let the micro USB port come loose--a
| common problem with the device, which seemed to happen to many
| over time. I remember still being able to charge it somehow
| (maybe I bought an external charger?). However, the nail in the
| coffin was when I was cleaning up some "unnecessary" cruft in the
| init directory, ostensibly to make the thing boot faster.
|
| What I discovered instead was that there was a watchdog that
| monitored for the existence of crucial files, and, failing to
| find them, the phone would reboot itself. So my glorious N900 was
| caught in a bootloop, and moreover without a functioning USB port
| to re-flash the operating system.
|
| Behind the battery, there are CPU pins that are directly exposed
| through a grid of copper pads. I made an attempt at wiring up a
| makeshift soldering job directly to the pins corresponding to a
| USB port, but failed to confidently pull off the dexterity to
| work with the small surface, as well as the care to do so without
| heating things up too much.
|
| Of course I believe there existed a development device with pins
| that directly clamped onto the pads, but if such a thing was
| publicly available it was probably hard to come by at affordable
| prices.
|
| I later tried to realize a similar experience to the N900 on
| Android using stuff like tmux and F-Droid. However, I have no
| good memories of any phone after my Nokia, and pretty much don't
| like phones at all at this point, and now just use my iPhone SE
| as a glorified flip phone with maps and a web browser.
| regularfry wrote:
| Mine died to this. USB port came loose, sat in the back of a
| drawer waiting for me to get round to fixing it, to be thrown
| away in a fit of "I'm never going to get round to any of these
| 20+ projects-in-waiting that have been collecting dust for the
| past N years". The battery was probably knackered by that point
| anyway.
|
| Genuinely regretting that now.
| speeder wrote:
| Nokia behaviour in Brazil infuriates me.
|
| 1. The burning platform thingy happened when Nokia was absolutely
| dominating Brazillian smartphone market, people had even ported
| Counter-Strike to Symbian! Then suddenly it was dead, and didn't
| even get replaced by iPhone as the memo predicted, instead it got
| replaced by chinese no-name phones (until the government got
| annoyed and banned them outright... if you use a imported phone,
| cell towers can kick it out of the network)
|
| 2. Nokia abandoned all their business here for some years.
|
| 3. Nokia is now back, but all they do is half-hearteadly sell
| some crappy androids, they KaiOS market is booming in India, and
| has much potential in Brazil, but they refuse to sell KaiOS
| phones here, and you can't import them (because they get kicked
| out of the network by the cell towers), meanwhile local companies
| are making crappy KaiOS phones and doing reasonably well.
| alex_duf wrote:
| The N9 was the first phone I know to be able to switch apps or
| close apps using the swipe movement.
|
| It was really hard moving to android as I missed the swiping to
| navigate the OS.
|
| Now Apple is using swiping and all the cool kids think it's cool
| again. But like any good hipster I can tell you I was doing it
| before it was cool.
| dntrkv wrote:
| I think the Palm WebOS was really ahead of it's time with how
| they handled multiple apps as "cards." The iOS UI is basically
| a clone of their approach. The Palm Pre brought some really
| interesting concepts to smartphones at the time.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| The N900 was fantastic. The phone was to be a leader until
| Stephen Elop.
|
| Elop was a Microsoft employee who never stopped being a microsoft
| employee. As fake ceo of nokia he convinced the board to switch
| to microsoft OS and drop their success. Nokia did that and then
| when Nokia sales plummetted to disasterous level he proposed
| selling that division to Microsoft at quite the discount.
| Afterall who wants to buy a failing division. 11,000 employees
| laid off because of Elop's incompetence.
|
| What the board should have done was fire Elop very publicly and
| move right back to the Linux ecosystem. They had a leg up to
| basically be what Pinephone, chinaphones, and so many other
| phones are trying to be.
| thro234889898 wrote:
| Shout out to SailfishOS which is the spiritual successor of
| Maemo.
| walterbell wrote:
| What's the best Sony device to buy for running Sailfish?
| throwdbaaway wrote:
| For the best price/performance ratio, I will still go with
| XA2 for now. Here, I can get a used XA2 Ultra in like-new
| condition for less than $200. Sailfish 4.0 is fantastic, and
| with micro-g, the phone works perfectly fine as a daily
| driver.
|
| The same couldn't be said for N900 or N9, at least for me. J1
| was rather slow but good enough, Xperia X was great for a
| year or so until Android 4.4 got churned, and now with Xperia
| XA2 and Xperia 10, we are finally there.
| windsurfer wrote:
| I have both an N900 and a Pro1 and it's everything I wanted in a
| phone/device. I'm using self-compiled LineageOS on it right now
| and it is as "Linux-y" as I need and want, complete with a usable
| terminal and SSH apps.
|
| I'm not sure why you haven't been able to get a review unit of
| the new Pro1-x model, but I'll get in contact with someone at
| f(x)tec for you.
| skykooler wrote:
| One thing from the N900 that I really miss on the Pro1 is the
| ability to multi-boot different operating systems. I think at
| one point I had five OS's running on my N900, mostly off of
| various microSD cards - Maemo, Android, Meego, SHR and Plasma
| Mobile. For the Pro1 I'd settle for being able to dual-boot
| Sailfish and LineageOS, but as it is now you need to pick one
| or the other.
| windsurfer wrote:
| Many people in the community are getting around this
| limitation by running virtual machines of the various
| operating systems they want. With the modern processor
| (compared to the N900) and the 6GB of RAM, performance seems
| to be totally usable on the Pro1.
| wazoox wrote:
| Ah yeah. There was a bug in the WiFi applet that prevented it to
| use 64 characters WPA2 passwords; only 63 could be entered in the
| field.
|
| Source: my company's WiFi was 64 characters, and the one employee
| with an N900 couldn't connect :)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely
| similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed.
| Because the interface was really terrible. It was so bad I even
| made an article about it here:
| https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/
|
| I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in
| many respects of course, but its interface was elegant,
| consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the
| same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface
| designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its
| applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA
| screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought
| was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the
| iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful.
|
| I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI
| is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good
| GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces
| Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat
| developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs
| because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had
| hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing
| design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not
| succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking
| that you didn't need one. And boy did it show.
|
| Also, terrible battery life.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around
| 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced.
|
| Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that
| every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so
| you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because
| consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in
| a corporate way that so many European companies were between
| 1990-2020.
|
| Apparently when the iPhone was announced the whole company was in
| deep shock and disarray. They were planning on the first
| touchscreen phones hitting the market around 2010-2015, and here
| was a company promising to deliver one by 2008.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Well, there must have been more to it than just "first
| touchscreen phones" - Openmoko Neo1973 was announced shortly
| before the iPhone was revealed and it was a touchscreen-only
| phone already, delivered in 2007.
| rchaud wrote:
| Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry.
|
| Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon
| pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first
| touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon
| exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of
| HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone.
|
| BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and
| would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a
| bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you
| tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used
| to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd
| dislocated the screen.
|
| Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T
| w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have
| been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before
| Samsung arrived.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Verizon was pretty hilarious with denial early on. I recall
| them coming to talk about what a piece of garbage the iPhone
| was to our CIO, and how BlackBerry would bury them, etc.
|
| Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of
| the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later.
|
| It's really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and
| had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long
| time. iPhone is just a magical product.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| iphone is magical; yet I'm replying on pixel3 right now
| despite recently moving to 12 max pro. I'm now carrying 2
| phones around. the iPhone for the camera and the pixel for
| the superior usability. magical I tell you.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Fifteen years later everyone has evolved.
|
| At the time though, the iPhone was questionable for a
| business user on paper. Weird touch keyboard, poor
| security (its active sync client lied about encryption),
| etc.
|
| But in the flesh, it was magical.
| piva00 wrote:
| Is it superior usability or superior possibilities to
| customise the phone?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| One depends on the other.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That verizon would do that is not surprising. They did not
| want to budge on those dataplan costs. Touting 'superior
| network' as their selling point. It was not until they
| tried to move into M2M that they realized no one was going
| to pay 45 bucks per MB and that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint
| would sell data and text at a much more reasonable rate.
| The original iPhone was neat but not much better than
| everything else out there in that category. Its one killer
| feature was that unlimited plan. That turned a remote
| device from something you did very little with because you
| did not want to get reamed on the data plans, to something
| you could hook the internet up to. It took verizon ages to
| realize it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I remember trying out a Storm.
|
| Webpage would render incredibly slowly because Blackberry
| weren't capable of putting a wifi chip in the handset (it was
| limited to edge if I recall). The whole UI was sluggish.
| Cherry on top? No apps. There was a way to write apps but it
| was pretty much a unique SDK per phone model. No app store of
| course.
|
| It hit the market a few months after Apple revealed the
| iPhone 3G and the App Store.
| rchaud wrote:
| I remember the no Wi-fi. It was shocking, but made perfect
| sense from BB's perspective. These were work devices after
| all, and your precious data was expected to be routed
| through an encrypted BES server that would also compress
| packet contents to save bandwidth.
|
| But it did have apps. Just not many. I remember downloading
| Pandora, Shazam and Whatsapp from the Blackberry App store.
| Android and iOS stores obviously dwarfed it in terms of
| quantity though.
| FooHentai wrote:
| When the Storm came out, the place I was working had placed
| pre-orders for the executive team. First day, they're all
| configured and sent out to much fanfare. Second day, many
| of them came back to IT, some airborne. After a month they
| were pretty much all returned in favor of something that
| actually worked, and we never placed any further orders.
|
| Remember their 'haptic' touchscreen tech, SurePress? Click
| Clack. Felt like a child's toy. Quite the departure from
| genuinely great stuff like the trackball/pearl.
| gambler wrote:
| _> Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their
| first touchscreen device_
|
| It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that
| they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality
| this is usually what they resort to when things go south.
| Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either
| via stupid features or working long hours or both.
| [deleted]
| rixrax wrote:
| There was no shock when iPhone was launched. Nokia had tried
| touch display phones already by that time and they had gone the
| way of N900 and deemed unviable. Disarray yes, but not because
| of iPhone. Of course there were people that appreciated the
| threat that iPhone might become, but if anything it was laughed
| at and ridiculed. I mean come on - no 3G and no QWERTY
| keyboard. Who in the world would use that! ;)
| butokai wrote:
| The N900 came two years after the iPhone, and Nokia's first
| touchscreen phone (the 5800) one year after the iPhone,
| though
| kefyras wrote:
| Nokia's first touchscreen smartphone came out in 2004.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 it was an oddball,
| for sure, but still.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a
| corporate way
|
| They were tripped up by their own success as the 800 lb gorilla
| of dumb phones that sold in the hundreds of millions.
|
| Nokia had a seperate department for "renewing the company
| through innovation". It was an internal incubator which
| reported directly to the CEO. It could scout for tech, and
| develop prototype product products.
|
| The problems started at the point where a new product was ready
| to leave the incubator. It had to be "sold" to an existing
| business unit in a suitable division.
|
| The hurdle was that pre-2007 Nokia divisions were raking in
| billions selling mature tech in enormous volumes through
| existing channels.
|
| There was no room and few candidates to champion anything new
| which required nurturing, development, ancillory technology and
| marketplaces, or, heaven forbid, new business models, starting
| from a revenue base of $0.00.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had touchscreen phones running
| Symbian on sale in 2002!
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| multi-touch + properly thought through nad responsive UI
| design was the dealbreaker.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Agreed, still they were touch screen regardless of having a
| stylus.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I still have one of these someplace in a drawer. Maemo was pretty
| nice, but the UX was all over the place sometimes and it became
| tedious to click through some menus with the stylus.
|
| Running a browser on it was doable, but the bit that really
| became a blocker for me was the lack of a fast, simple e-mail
| client (even non-touch screen Blackberries were better, and had
| slightly better keyboards).
| neilv wrote:
| There's a pmOS effort to make the N900 hardware usable with
| modern kernel:
|
| https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)
|
| There was also a project to replace the hardware:
|
| https://neo900.org/
|
| When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I
| wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a
| few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the
| once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been
| removed from the Internet. That kind of thing is another reason
| to support efforts like pmOS.
| linmob wrote:
| Another nice OS for the N900 is Maemo Leste
| (https://leste.meamo.org), which is basically the same software
| as ran originally, but modernized; sadly, when I last tried it,
| it still lacked a GUI for key features like calls and texts.
| toyg wrote:
| _> a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had
| simply been removed from the Internet_
|
| Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed
| with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do
| opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted
| in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid
| issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And
| then they pivoted to the Intel partnership just like that, from
| one day to the next, which meant jettisoning a massive amount
| of effort from the community (deb to rpm, effectively
| abandoning Qt, etc).
|
| It was really a strange relationship. They kept writing rivers
| of (digital) ink on their love for OSS and blablabla, but then
| took all major decisions behind closed doors.
| neilv wrote:
| Interesting. I wasn't involved at the time, and, when I went
| trying to reconstruct the open source afterwards, I suspected
| the ill-fated Microsoft deal might've had something to do
| with it. But sounds like there were problems before then.
|
| A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had
| trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our
| collective understanding of this improved even within the
| last few years (e.g., community development processes like
| Rust's).
|
| (Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might
| also be forgetting things that people used to know --
| repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way,
| and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier
| community foresee and avoid at the time.)
| gtk40 wrote:
| I had a Nokia N800 "Internet Tablet" and loved that device.
| Android was a huge downgrade compared to what you could do with
| that in every way except interface, and the interface wasn't too
| bad.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I had the older 770, and loved it with all its limitations. I
| recall downloading Google maps images of a desired area trough
| a 3rd party tool that would also stitch them together, then and
| using them on the 770 with an external GPS receiver to have
| sort of a live map while driving. And the LCARS Star Trek
| styled screen gave a nice touch too. Nokia was developing great
| products back then, then one day Microsoft came and ended it
| all.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Did the same with my N800 while driving in South Africa. The
| downloaded satellite maps showed the roads that were actually
| there, unlike those on the maps.. and that was very
| important, as it turned out. Very glad we had that N800.
|
| (I had the N800 first, and got the N900 when it came out)
| dbish wrote:
| Same. In college I would show it off while working at the IT
| desk by sshing into the computer lab machines and checking on
| running programs/homework/etc. Used a bluetooth keyboard for
| the full "hacker-on-the-go" experience
| serf wrote:
| I had an N800 and and N900 afterwards.
|
| I used the N800 until the battery eventually failed.
|
| It was amazingly liberating, as a 'computer person', to have a
| truly hand-held computer; all my friends and family thought it
| was a stupid toy with a hard-to-understand interface -- but
| they liked drawing on it.
| jbj wrote:
| I had an N800 and found it so amazing, 2 sd card slots, pop
| out camera that could rotate, and a useful kickstand. I
| recently found the Planet Computers devices and tried their
| first version out, it is conceptually a bit similar to the
| fxtec mentioned in the blog post.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus.
|
| It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive
| touchscreens in every way.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| I wouldn't say "every way", but the lack of multi-touch was
| sometimes an advantage. I loved the swirl-to-zoom gesture on
| the N900, pinch-to-zoom on multi-touch screens always feels
| clunky in comparison. If I wanted to zoom in or out on the
| N900, I just used the thumb that was already hovering over the
| screen, of the hand holding a phone. Pinching to zoom needs two
| _hands_ , one to hold the phone, the other to perform the
| gesture.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Amen. I absolutely hate pinch to zoom. Screw to zoom is
| better, and actually educational. Teaches righty-tighty
| lefty-loosey.
|
| IIRC lack of multitouch was a software problem. The N900 was
| rife with software problems. If they had just kept the Linux
| orthodox and left out the binary blobs, they would have been
| able to go back to the platform after the MS disaster with
| the OS looking and working 10x better than where they left
| it.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Maybe I wouldn't say "every way" (it doesn't age very well,
| several of my N900s have developed issues with their digitizers
| by now), but I do agree that it's superior. Much more accurate
| and pleasant to use than today's touchscreens; and way less
| prone to accidental touches. I have switched to a Librem 5 now,
| but I miss the N900's resistive screen.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| The killer feature of a resistive screen IMO is its
| environmental resitance. It's not afraid of water, and can be
| used in gloves, or using any vaguely stick-shaped tool when
| your fingers are dirty.
| toopok4k3 wrote:
| Are you still stuck in 2008? Perhaps worked at Nokia?
|
| I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because
| how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those
| screens felt!
|
| Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to
| realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones
| with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| While definitely not "superior" in every way, it was more
| precise also with a finger (at least on the n900; other
| devices had worse quality resistive screens). So you for
| example could draw or hit small buttons much more easily.
|
| For capacitive screens you instead have to add another
| digitizer layer by wacom or n-trig to be able to draw, which
| took a while and still is not common enough. That said, bad
| quality resistive screens were much, much more frustrating to
| use than bad capacitive screen.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage
| to realize what a lie it is.
|
| I'm going to have to call this subjective, because,
| surprisingly, I've also used capacitive screens.
|
| I could use the N900 wet and in gloves, and it was pressure
| sensitive. Also, I once dropped it so hard that it broke a
| tiny piece of the sidewalk off (I tried to catch it while it
| was falling, and instead batted it and added velocity to the
| fall.) The screen was fine. I've never seen a cracked N900
| screen.
|
| The only time it required a stylus is when I was using a
| desktop UI on it, making everything microscopic. If you did
| that with a capacitive screen _it would require a special
| stylus_ , whereas with my N900, a toothpick would do.
| indymike wrote:
| If you go back a little bit, there are a few devices that really
| were forks in the road for the industry. Probably the biggest,
| most important:
|
| * Commodore Amiga
|
| * Psion PDAs
|
| * Nokia N900
|
| * Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the
| iPhone)
|
| All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900
| and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but
| all four ended up in history's dustbin because of business
| issues.
| krtkush wrote:
| I would add Nokia N9 too.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The Amiga is a little weird, I think it had to many custom
| chips to be successful. The PC succeeded because of the clones.
| Cloning the Amiga would be insanely hard, because only
| Commodore had access to chips required to make the Amiga run.
| Larrikin wrote:
| This was a neat phone to have during it's time, but I remember
| having it for a while and the killer app that came out months
| after I got the phone was MMS. The engineers at Nokia just
| couldn't figure it out but someone hacked on it long enough to
| enable it. Fairly certain they flew the guy out and offered him a
| job.
| CharleFKane wrote:
| I got in a little late: some of my friends bought N770s early on,
| but I didn't get in until the N800.
|
| I own (still) an N800 and an N810. Though I haven't picked up
| either in a while, I thought they were nifty devices at the time,
| and should pick them back up again. I still think they have a lot
| going for them. (The N800 was actually the first mobile
| navigation system I ever used, with an external Bluetooth GPS and
| software based on OpenStreetMaps.)
|
| I was unable to find an N900 anywhere when it was new. I was met
| with pretty much blank stares.
|
| Eventually, an online vendor got some refurbished N900s in stock
| at a good price. I ordered one, got it, plugged it in overnight
| to charge...
|
| ...and in the morning, it was totally dead. I emailed the vendor
| and asked for an exchange because, you know, one bad one out of
| the bunch, they were refurbs anyway, no problem.
|
| The vendor wrote back and told me that they had received a batch
| of 28 of them. ALL the ones they got had some sort of problem
| that resulted in a return, they would not be getting any more of
| them, and if I sent it back they'd give me a refund.
|
| Thus ended my N900 experiment.
| ebfe1 wrote:
| Had my N900 when it first came out and to this day it is still my
| most favourite device! I kept it for a long time as 2nd device, I
| had pwnphone on it for a ages and showed off to friends how i
| could Deauth all their wifi devices, run kismet, even crack WEP,
| turn off their TV with tvbgone app using infrared...
| Black101 wrote:
| I wish I could own a phone like this today. Too bad companies are
| so cheap that they can only produce keyboardless phones with
| widescreens...
| opan wrote:
| There is the PinePhone, and a keyboard attachment is actively
| being worked on.
|
| https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/
|
| > PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well - but we're still
| waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this
| month
|
| There are pictures as well.
| noipv4 wrote:
| I loved the fact that the N900 in USA came with the new T-Mobile
| 3.5G band, which at that time (~2010) was quite congestion free.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I remember trying to get the successor N9 which was DOA due to
| the announcement of the Microsoft deal. Nokia had their platform
| to go up against Android and Apple, but it was simply too late. I
| think the N9 compares favorably against both iPhones and Android
| at the time, and Nokia was ahead in terms of cameras.
| gt565k wrote:
| I miss good quality phones with replaceable batteries and sd card
| slots.
| toyg wrote:
| I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then
| C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business
| and become a real developer for the platform while it was still
| "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not
| seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not
| interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a
| store was a byzantine process, and expensive too iirc).
|
| I attended an event with an "evangelist" here in Manchester, I
| was all fired up. It was some dude from Finland on a UK tour, and
| from the start it was all about the transition to QT on Symbian -
| this was to an audience full of people already working on iOS, to
| whom Symbian was a bad joke. He kept going on about the marvels
| of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a
| novelty, but clearly it had just reached Finland or something.
| Maemo was a footnote, "oh yeah we have that too", it was
| absolutely clear he just didn't care for it - the future was QT
| on Symbian. People were snickering; I wanted to strangle him. I
| reckon he single-handedly destroyed any local interest in
| developing for Nokia. I gave up shortly afterwards, and then the
| burning-platform memo happened and that was it.
|
| My N900 is now an mp3 player for my 9yo son. The MicroUSB-B
| socket is a bit loose, iirc that was common with early adopters
| of that standard. The backlit keys have yellowed, or maybe the
| LEDs have. Everything else still works fine, although the
| software is obviously obsolete. My kid wonders why he has to
| press the screen that hard, and I feel like someone trying to
| explain ancient history.
|
| What a waste, Nokia, what a waste.
| flukus wrote:
| > He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that
| point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty
|
| From what I remember this was because they'd spent so much time
| and effort building up the maemo (or meeGo or whatever) and
| burned up so much goodwill with the switch to Qt. When the
| burning platform memo came out they'd literally just burned
| another platform, regardless of technical merit the timing for
| moving to Qt couldn't have been worse.
| seego wrote:
| Imho the problem was exactly the opposite. Investing too much
| in the old symbian platform and not commiting to maemo.
| [deleted]
| Tor3 wrote:
| I used my N900 until a week ago, I finally moved the SIM card
| over to another phone (a dual-SIM one), because the (original)
| battery didn't take much charge anymore. Hardware-wise it's as
| good as new (mine is Made in Finland). Over the years I've used
| it to do support work in Antarctica using VPN from whatever
| cafeteria I was at at the time, other types of work where I
| needed a Linux computer and only had the phone, it's been
| running my minicomputer emulator, I did development work for it
| (the SDK running on my PC - basically a Debian setup), and, of
| course, as my phone.
|
| The MicroUSB socket was a weak point, the fix was to file off
| the two notches on microUSB cables before using them with the
| N900. So my N900's USB socket is still good as new.
| anthk wrote:
| >'ve used it to do support work in Antarctica
|
| That should be a whole post by itself.
| simonh wrote:
| I cut my teeth on GUI development with PyQT back in the day. I
| couldn't afford an N900 at the time, but was sorely tempted.
|
| Ironically the best mobile platform for hacking GUI and mobile
| apps in Python now is, er, iOS. Pythonista gives access to
| almost the entire iOS API suite (and slightly hacky access to
| all of it), even has a GUI builder built-in, and is highly
| programmable directly on the device. Pyto is pretty cool too.
| Hard to believe, but that's where we are.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Python on iOS is still a joke compared to what you can do on
| phones like Librem 5 or PinePhone, or even several other
| devices via distros like postmarketOS.
| simonh wrote:
| In what way? On my devices I have full access to the native
| APIs and robust networking libraries for access to web
| services. There's Git integration available. I'm not aware
| of any Android programming environments that provide on-
| device GUI builders. I can sync code using iCloud or
| Dropbox if Git is too heavyweight.
|
| Frankly the options on Android look extremely primitive in
| comparison, and largely depend on off-device development
| for anything above very basic and incomplete terminal
| prompt level features. iOS on-device development went
| beyond that with commercial-grade on-device development
| environments a decade ago, but Android seems stuck there
| permanently.
|
| I'm not really sure why that is, there doesn't seem to be
| any technical limitation preventing the emergence of well
| specified complete development environments, like Codea,
| Pythonista and Pyto on Android but it never seems to
| happen. When I got my first iPad I was half expecting to
| have to get an Android device eventually just to be able to
| code on it, but it never happened and the on-device
| development story on iOS has gone from strength to
| strength.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| In a way that Python is provided by the system out-of-
| box, you can use regular PyGObject bindings for
| everything (or Pyside or whatever else you want), use any
| third party modules from system repos or pip - exactly
| how you would on a desktop; you can even use it to write
| system daemons. Neither iOS or Android can compete with
| that.
| toyg wrote:
| You still cannot ship the resulting apps though. One has to
| hack around with the likes of Kivy to get that. On Maemo you
| could just ship a Deb (at least outside the braindead Nokia
| store, which was restricted to C++).
|
| The sad thing is, I remember attending a PyConUK about 10
| years ago where this was a clear item in the keynote (by Van
| Lindberg, iirc): "the Python story on mobile is non-
| existent". Everybody agreed it was a priority.
| simonh wrote:
| Several apps have been shipped based on Pythonista,
| including games. The developer released an Xcode template,
| you drop your Python code into it and build an app from it.
| Pyto is open source, once you have a working app developed
| on-device you can just pull Pyto from Github and add your
| code to build an app the same way, but it's not as complete
| as Pythonista.
|
| There are non-python dev environments that enable the same
| thing, like Codea that uses Lua. It has several published
| apps and games out there on the App Store as well.
| toyg wrote:
| Ah wow, this looks nice! I'll check it out!
|
| It was completely off my radar, clearly - it could use
| more publicity then...
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I was also pretty enthusiastic about the platform. Nokia big
| missed opportunity. My impression was that there was a brief
| window in history where they could've set themselves up as a
| rival to iOS and Android.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| "and in any case they were not interested in small devs
| (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine
| process, and expensive too iirc)"
|
| I had the exact same experience with RIM/Blackberry 957-era...
| Great device, completely clueless company regarding an
| independent software ecosystem.
|
| Say what you will about Apple, but they truly knocked down
| walls and opened the mobile floodgates to independent
| developers.
| cscotti wrote:
| Big +1 to this. I was a big n900 fan who ended up getting a job
| a Nokia through some of the OSS stuff I made for it and your
| diagnosis of the "Qt for Symbian" problem is 100% spot on. The
| amount of time/effort that they put on Symbian past 2009 is
| ridiculous... classic case of the fallacy of sunken cost.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too,
| and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the
| future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the
| doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open
| source software etc..
|
| Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software
| platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really
| understand anything of that.
| whereistimbo wrote:
| Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux
| originated?
| Gravityloss wrote:
| No, he's from University of Helsinki.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| It's kind of funny that nothing notable in the open
| source world came out of Aalto. Linus Torvalds and Tatu
| Ylonen (ssh) studied in University of Helsinki while
| University of Oulu's Jarkko Oikarinen created IRC.
| nivenkos wrote:
| That's an incredible output for such a small country
| really.
| toyg wrote:
| Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue
| remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to
| convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded
| like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really
| wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009.
|
| I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds'
| homeland.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Symbian folks inside Nokia at the time lived in a reality
| distortion field. Your experience is not the only instance
| where the Symbian division inside the company railroaded
| the Maemo project, which they saw first and foremost as a
| threat to their jobs and political dominance. As TFA notes,
| N900 was preceded by N770, N800, and N810 "internet
| tablets". N810 in particular was basically the same device
| as N900, but despite having otherwise state of the art
| wireless communication tech all of them lacked one very
| crucial component: a mobile data modem. Internet connection
| was only possible over WiFi (or even RJ45-USB dongle) but
| not SIM.
|
| The reason for this was of course not technical - the
| Symbian folks inside Nokia simply managed to convince the
| executive level management that adding mobile data would
| turn these devices from PDAs to a smartphones, and it would
| be very ill-advisable to launch a competing smartphone
| platform to Symbian.
|
| When Maemo folks finally got a chance to "give us a try"
| (and I guess management saw with the competition that they
| needed something more modern), the result was N900.
| Considering it was meant as a "niche" device its sales
| exceeded all projections. However, in the grand scheme of
| things it was just an experiment designed to fail and
| further cement the dominance of Symbian.
|
| I think Nokia also developed a fully-working tablet around
| either Maemo or MeeGo. It was literally ready to ship, but
| was at last minute cancelled before the launch event due to
| backroom dealing again by the Symbian folks.
|
| It has all been documented in the book "Operation Elop",
| which paints a pretty good picture about everything that
| went on behind the scenes during the demise of the once
| great Nokia: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ The book is
| based around absolutely exclusive interviews of people who
| served in Nokia's board and top executive positions at the
| time.
| fifilura wrote:
| Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to
| compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised
| they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of
| realising they had built exactly what was needed.
|
| It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the
| endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as
| in Symbian.
|
| The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing
| OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the
| platform was bump in the road.
|
| (I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance
| model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++,
| so performance on this type of devices was problematic.
| Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit
| weird given the long history of Gtk.)
| toyg wrote:
| It wasn't about performance; GTK (or rather a GTK-based
| framework called Hildon) continued to be the default
| toolkit all the way to Maemo 5 ("Fremantle"), which is
| what shipped on the N900. It was also what Intel used on
| Moblin, the OS that was supposed to merge with Maemo to
| become MeeGo.
|
| The issue with QT was all about Nokia: QT was supposed to
| save the Symbian platform, and also provide an on-ramp to
| Maemo (at least in theory - in practice nobody was really
| committed to that...). So the Maemo folks were obligated
| to switch to QT, which they did fairly easily; the result
| was what shipped on the N9, effectively Maemo 6
| ("Harmattan") rebranded as "MeeGo 1.2".
|
| In short: QT was adopted to please the Symbian people,
| and it was all for nothing anyway. That suited me just
| fine when first announced (Hildon was an under-documented
| mess of C with obsolete and unusable Python bindings,
| whereas QT had first-class wrappers like PyQt), but many
| Maemo old-timers never really warmed to it.
| lenkite wrote:
| If the Nokia board had not hired Elop or had fired him in time,
| Maemo would have been a third mobile platform alternative today
| - one likely far more open than Android.
|
| Elop was a truly successful Nokia saboteur. An illustrative
| case study of how a single CEO can destroy a company for his
| self-profit and go out laughing with no legal repercussions.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Nokia's error was not firing the Symbian activists before it
| was too late
|
| If they had set full sail on Maemo, it would have been the
| 3rd platform today.
| pjmlp wrote:
| WRONG!
|
| Elop did exactly what the Nokia board asked him to do.
|
| All anti-Elop bashers should read about what happened before
| spreading this content.
| lenkite wrote:
| Yes, please do your own research and read on how the
| Nokia's board of Directors saw the memo as an act of
| _misjudgement_ and how Chairman Jorma Ollila gave bitter
| feedback for it at a board meeting.
|
| During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%,
| their mobile phone market share was halved, their
| smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the
| company suffered a cumulative EUR4.9 billion loss
| pjmlp wrote:
| Former employee.
|
| I happened to be in Espoo office during the week the memo
| came out, to give a training on NetAct related
| technologies.
|
| No research needed.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| Elop was awful, but I agree that he was exactly what the
| board wanted (from everything I heard at the time and
| since.)
| walterbell wrote:
| Any recommended links? Did anyone look into which funds
| shorted Nokia as market cap dropped from 30B?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, you can start here
|
| > A Finnish newspaper has uncovered information in the
| SEC filings for Nokia's sale to Microsoft that show
| former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had a huge incentive to
| unload the company in the form of a $25.5 million US
| bonus that he would get in the event of a "change of
| control" in the mobile company.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stephen-elop-to-
| get-25-5m-f...
|
| Followed by Tomi T Ahonen posts,
|
| https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/
| pjmlp wrote:
| From the inside that is how pretty much we went through it.
|
| The community was already getting tired of the multiple Symbian
| reboots (just IDEs there were three of them), then came PIPS
| and Qt, while it seemed like a strecht everyone was kind of
| still on boat.
|
| However then the whole Linux vs Symbian started to gain steam,
| Symbian went open source, and finally the burning platforms
| memo happenend.
|
| Not many happy faces at Espoo during that week, and even more
| unhappy devs asked to throw everything away and jump into .NET,
| when the Nokia community had a long tradition of Java and C++
| development stacks.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time.
| These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by
| management that preferred other platforms they had.
|
| So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the
| name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian
| instead.
|
| Some fun facts about Maemo:
|
| Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and
| GTK, a mozilla based browser and was based on Debian. You could
| build your own packages, add your own apt repositories, and
| people basically built most of Debian from source to run on it.
| E.g. I had a JVM running on it and a full LAMP stack at some
| point.
|
| The N800 was for a time the only device that could run Android
| (dual boot) and basically shared large parts of the kernel with
| it. Google used this device for early Android testing and
| probably owes a lot to Nokia engineers contributing patches to
| the Linux kernel. The first Nexus phone shipped quite late in the
| Android development process.
|
| Development of Meego saw several strategy changes that ultimately
| delayed products for a long time. One of those unfortunate
| decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT; effectively
| retiring all of the user facing UI. That set back the clock by
| years. And it got slowed down further by a simultaneous attempt
| to get Symbian on QT as well. That trainwreck of course ended up
| sucking up all the resources and failed to ultimately deliver the
| goods. This was in the middle of Nokia's realization that "oh
| fuck this iphone thing is real; we need a touch screen UI". It
| killed at least two touch screen platforms that it had before it
| came to that realization.
|
| Technically, the N800 was running circles around the first iphone
| in terms of what you could do on it. All it needed was a bit of
| hardware polish and a phone stack. Early Android had nothing on
| Meego. Even the UX was clumsy and it was slow and limited as
| well. But unlike Meego, Google shipped it and supported it and
| persisted in developing it. Nokia instead threw out the baby with
| the bathwater betting on several other horses before ultimately
| walking away from the whole phone business.
|
| Nokia declined to combine a phone stack + SIM card with the N770
| and N800 deeming it to risky; they were protecting their deals
| with operators to basically cripple phones in favor of crappy
| operating services. E.g. bundling Skype with the n800 was
| controversial. It even did video calls with Skype. In 2007. The
| N800 was a tablet before the iphone, ipad or Android were a
| thing. There was not a lot else in the market at that point. That
| thing with a phone stack would have been a killer product despite
| its many limitations.
|
| The N900 and the later N9 were both labelled as developer phones
| and cut off from any serious marketing effort. The N9 technically
| was a decent phone but by the time it shipped, the team had been
| layed off, the platform cancelled and Nokia was endorsing Windows
| Phone. It also shipped an Android phone around the same time,
| leaving the ugly job of cancelling that product to Microsoft
| after the acquisition.
|
| Samsung's Bada is a direct decendent of Meego. It never really
| gained any market share against Android and it seems Samsung
| pretty much gave up on it.
| butokai wrote:
| I would be curious to know more about the several devices that
| were planned to be on Meego but then shipped with Symbian!
|
| I remember seeing Bada phones at the time, but (at least in my
| country) the "does it run WhatsApp" era was already starting,
| and the total lack of apps for Bada made it totally
| unattractive.
|
| All said, I am not sure that polishing and marketing would have
| been enough to save the situation. I didn't see Palm's Pre and
| webOS mentioned in the thread so far: that makes for an example
| of an excellent platform, with good marketing and capabilities,
| that still didn't manage to affect the rise of the duopoly.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I know the N8 was at some point earmarked for Meego. But
| internal politics happened.
|
| That would have been a true flagship phone around 2011 with a
| 12 megapixel camera, aluminium body and nice touch screen. I
| had it in Symbian form and it was alright but ultimately meh
| in terms of software. Essentially all Android phones at that
| point were a combination of slow, not very premium, and
| riddled with bugs. This was way before Google figured out how
| to do software updates properly.
|
| A slick UI, linux, touchscreen, etc. exactly what Nokia
| needed at that point. But they convinced themselves Symbian
| was good enough and were corrected by the market that made it
| very clear that it wasn't even close. Of course crippling the
| device with not enough memory did not help. Nokia saved
| pennies and sacrificed market share with that.
| zelos wrote:
| > One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap
| out GTK for QT;
|
| That was kind of swings and roundabouts, though. The second
| version of the Maemo app I worked on ended up being a major
| rewrite Gtk->Qt thanks to the switch, but Qt was _so_ much
| better.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, it just meant shipping after Apple and Android had
| become entrenched in the market. Nokia wasted a good two
| years doing this. And it was too little too late.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| It's stunning to me just how many incredible technical efforts
| Nokia made to just kill. The N9 after this was killer but boom,
| dead, the Nokia X was okay but weird, Dead, the Lumia, alive,
| then boom, dead. It's remarkable that Elop was never prosecuted
| for his actions that clearly were in benefit to his prior
| employer.
|
| It's almost hilarious that modern Nokia HMD makes phones now
| because I expect the company to randomly up and disappear and
| come back with a WebOS phone or some other weird offshoot.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Elop was a stooge that executed the master plan created bv
| the Nokia board together with MS as specified. Blame the
| decade of incompetence that preceded Elop.
| noipv4 wrote:
| It had amazing multitasking prowess for a 2010 phone:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Screens...
| subspaceman wrote:
| I was so excited about the N900 when it was announced - a linux
| machine in my pocket! I couldn't justify the price, being freshly
| out of school though. Nokia advertised a competition asking the
| public how they would "hack" the device to make something cool. I
| submitted a proposal to make a bike dashboard - it sounds so
| basic now, but I wanted a simple way to track my ride and
| proposed fun little additions like using the ambient light sensor
| to turn on an external headlight, a horn, etc.
|
| They picked my proposal along with a couple others and gave us
| some budget to buy hardware and components, and about 3 or 4
| weeks to complete the project. It was my first time soldering,
| first time using an Arduino, and I remember being so stressed out
| about whether or not it would work.
|
| It all came together in the end and looking back with hindsight
| now, I really owe a lot to that competition and the phone that
| let me pretty quickly write python apps on it :) Good times.
| originalvichy wrote:
| I got it as a graduation gift and it steered me into this field
| due to giving me a real contact with Unix/Linux and tinkering.
| I had tried Linux desktop but as a young gamer the moment
| browsing the web for the day was done, it was time to fire up
| Windows and play.
|
| The N900 was different. I didn't understand everything I was
| doing, but installing deb's, overclocking a CPU, installing
| Android v2.x, installing emulators, browsing forums for more
| tinkering (I could go on) was the thing that made me love
| computers more.
|
| Last but not least, it had a killer feature any fresh 18-year-
| old with friends that had cars loved back then: FM
| transmitter!! Back when AUX inputs were still a rarity and
| bluetooth was pairing... pairing... pairing... just pressing a
| button and tuning to a channel to get crystal clear audio was
| AMAZING. That and the IR blaster made for some nice party
| tricks.
| danans wrote:
| I had an N810 (predecessor to the N900), and it was very cool -
| at the time, it really felt like "the future". However, I must
| admit that I liked it for what it was -a toy - and not for what
| it could actually do in a productive sense. At the end of the
| day, it wasn't possible to perform any sustained productive
| activity on it.
|
| In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an
| inverse relationship between the portability and the productivity
| of a computing device.
|
| This is particularly true for types work that involves mentally
| integrating and generating large (for the human mind) amounts of
| information like code - but also for reviewing documents,
| managing financial accounts (interacting with a large spreadsheet
| on a phone is a nightmare).
|
| It's why at the end of the day, most engineers and architects
| (whether in software or real engineers in the physical realm),
| get most of their work done in front of large screens with full
| size keyboards (or at least large laptops).
|
| This isn't to say that there aren't niche use cases or
| circumstances where a Linux computer in your pocket isn't
| extremely useful - the example always rolled out being "remote
| administration" of a server - but even these tend to be
| exceptions. It's nearly always better to accomplish remote
| administration tasks from a laptop.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I hate to keep evangelizing about the N900, but I didn't bring
| my laptop on business trips to conferences (i.e. non-coding
| business trips.) The N900 was enough for me to ssh work I had
| to do at the office, and enough for me for everything else.
|
| My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|"
| wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a
| screen touch to get to.
| danans wrote:
| I fully believe and acknowledge that for some very niche use
| cases, this might work. In particular, the specific use case
| of "ssh to a server and run a few commands". But even in that
| example, if the output of the command is many pages of error
| or logging output that you need to diagnose, the tiny screen
| and keyboard are going to become ineffective very quickly.
|
| Even while at a conference and doing conference-y things like
| modifying, giving, or reviewing presentations, a bigger
| screen and keyboard are pretty indispensable.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| > CTRL+F "pine"
|
| > 0 results
|
| what
| jeffbee wrote:
| Guess why. Like Maemo and OpenMoko, absolutely nobody cares
| about PinePhone.
| nfriedly wrote:
| +1 for the GPD call out! I have a GPD Win Max, and while I mostly
| use it for playing games, I have done some programing and
| networking work on it.
|
| Although I feel like the GPD MicroPC might be of more interest to
| the type of person who would have gone for a N900. It's a bit
| smaller than the Pocket 2 that they linked to, while at the same
| time having a better port selection -
| https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc
| wartron wrote:
| Before this was a "feature phone" the Nokia 9000, i loved it.
|
| When this was out I was using the OG Motorola Droid. I wanted one
| of these but they were not available on my carrier so I stayed on
| the Droid line. The hot-dog slide keyboard was amazing. I had
| full terminal control from these.
|
| Nowadays I actually still rock a 2017 iphone SE; dimensions wise
| I don't want anything bigger in width or height, but i would
| gladly add some thickness to get a full tactile keyboard again.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I used an N900 for a few years (got one with the early adopter
| discount when it was released). While the keyboard was miles
| ahead of all the on-screen stuff at the time I don't think I
| want to go back to that keyboard from a current decent touch-
| screen phone. The keys were a bit too small for fast typing...
| u801e wrote:
| I wonder how it compared to the keyboard on the N97. Though
| it was a symbian based phone, the putty client allowed you to
| connect to a server and attach to a screen or tmux session,
| which worked okay with that keyboard and a few on-screen
| buttons.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| The key size is alright, I'm able to type on it much faster
| than on a touchscreen - provided that I don't need to use
| anything else than regular letters. The most painful thing on
| that keyboard is lack of 4th row of keys.
| pabs3 wrote:
| I hear that the N900 is the best supported mobile device in
| mainline Linux, except perhaps for the PowerVR GPU, although
| there are rumours ImgTec are writing an open source driver for
| Linux & Mesa for PowerVR.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I've heard those rumors for about 10 years already though :)
| purpleidea wrote:
| It was the best device I ever had. Still is. The GTK+Linux+GNU
| was beautiful. Proved how much potential GTK and the platform
| has.
| shmerl wrote:
| I still hope some viable and fully open Linux option will emerge
| that's not Android. And have good quality devices with that.
| Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it
| caused.
|
| I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland
| compositor and a normal Linux stack.
| fctorial wrote:
| > Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift
| it caused
|
| What drift?
| shmerl wrote:
| Rift between standard Linux stack and Android stack.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| (disclosure: I work for Purism)
|
| That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about -
| https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
|
| A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular
| GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :)
|
| There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its
| lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include
| software development.
| [deleted]
| shmerl wrote:
| That's a very good development for sure. I hope the hardware
| will be able to progress, since SoC choices for further
| improvements are very limited and the likes of Qualcomm are
| DOA.
| summm wrote:
| Sadly, neither of them are a match to even middle-class
| phones regarding hardware quality and performance.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android
| phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft
| didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their
| proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices
| (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on
| phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.
| whereistimbo wrote:
| I wonder why Nokia didn't go to Android route. It's like it
| still want to have a platform where it is seen as king and not
| as another commodity player. Or maybe Nokia was just having a
| pet peeve with Google.
| mavhc wrote:
| Nokia was a hardware company, they didn't value software.
| They'd design a phone, and then pick an OS to run on it at
| the last minute.
| jart wrote:
| My favorite device from that era was the HP Jornada since that
| with linux and an orinoco card felt like something straight out
| of the hacking movies. https://youtu.be/1s-tekLn7Nc
| egfx wrote:
| Interesting I didn't know about this device. I had the HP Pre3.
| Looking at this is like watching the evolution of dinosaurs to
| mammals in a way.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I was a Symbian developer at that time. The fate of N900 is a
| grim reminder that engineering brilliance will still lose out to
| managerial incompetence.
|
| Seriously, the device was just so attractive both for users and
| programmers. If Nokia were able to stay the course, they could
| pull off a bestseller.
|
| Their nosedive into the ground under Stephen Elop is a stuff of
| dark legends.
| whereistimbo wrote:
| Not really. Even before Elop, there were multiple layer of
| management and the culture of CMA (Cover My Arse) was so
| strong, as I heard from other Nokia ex-employees. Not to
| mention people from Symbian Inc wasn't good people according to
| the book about rise and fall of Symbian.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I know they had leadership problems before, but they weren't
| doomed. Their sales and relationship with carriers were
| excellent.
|
| Their fate was by no means foreordained and someone different
| from Stephen Elop (say, Tim Cook?) would have different
| results.
| markb139 wrote:
| It's interesting how devices have gone. Nokia, when they were
| focused, were making devices smaller, cheaper and with
| improved battery life. Now we get these giant devices that
| need re-charging daily and cost >PS1000
| simonh wrote:
| It's a good point. I think it highlights the fact that
| these are not really the same kinds of device, so can't be
| evaluated on the same criteria. If we were still just
| buying phones nobody would spend that much on something
| that consumes so much power. The mistake Nokia and the
| others made was they thought the iPhone was just a phone.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I can confirm it was to some extent like that.
|
| The first maemo tablets did not have radio to avoid competion
| with Symbian, and devices like S90, for example.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I loved the Nokia N900's design, that hardware keyboard that made
| it so easy to do remote system administration over SSH, or keep
| doing everything that I want to do in Emacs just like on my
| laptop or desktop computers. Also like all Nokia phones of the
| time, it was nearly indestructible and could easily survive drops
| that would destroy a modern smartphone's screen or casing.
|
| However, in retrospect not all was rosy. Advocates of Linux
| phones today would prefer to avoid binary blobs that make
| upgrades impossible (the N900 is forever stuck on kernel 2.6) and
| a cellular modem connected directly to main memory.
| u801e wrote:
| I wish I had the opportunity to use the N900. I still have a
| partially working N9 (the SIM holder lock is broken meaning I
| have to hold the SIM in to use it for calls). I still browse
| and post on HN using it on occasion.
| sidpatil wrote:
| > the SIM holder lock is broken meaning I have to hold the
| SIM in to use it for calls
|
| Why not just tape it in place?
| u801e wrote:
| There's a spring mechanism that pushes it out. It worked by
| pressing in to lock it and then pressing in again to unlock
| it. The cover is recessed relative to the case, so it would
| be a bit difficult to secure it with tape unfortunately.
| noipv4 wrote:
| I had to end up using a small drop of superglue.
| CTOSian wrote:
| superglue is a no go there... I repair such things using
| tamper evident seal (those red/blue varnish for tamper
| proof screws etc)
| tominated wrote:
| I still have my N9 lying around somewhere - had to get the
| sim tray replaced two or three times but otherwise I loved
| it. How did you update the security certificates? I tried to
| boot mine up a while back but it was basically unusable on
| the web because of HTTPS.
| u801e wrote:
| I haven't updated the security certificates so far, bit I
| don't think that most of the TLS connection issues are due
| to expired CA certificates in the certificate bundle. I
| believe it's because it can't negotiate a mutually agreed
| upon cipher.
|
| It still works with a few websites like this one. In fact,
| I'm using my N9 to post this comment :-).
| ggus wrote:
| The design has been re-proposed a few times, notably the
| F(x)tec PRO1 looks really similar and cool.
|
| https://www.fxtec.com/pro1
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Maemo Fremantle may be stuck on 2.6, but N900 is not - it's
| pretty well supported in mainline kernel. Also, the cellular
| modem (Rapuyama - BB5) on N900 isn't connected to main memory,
| it's pretty much a separate component (which was used as a main
| CPU on some other Nokia phones).
| drudu wrote:
| I had one of these and your note of "a cellular modem connected
| directly to main memory" makes me laugh. I didn't know that
| until now but I think that clears up why phone calls could
| crash the phone in some circumstances.
|
| Like you said it was a fantastic little linux terminal - great
| for SSH and it was certainly fun and novel to have a linux CLI
| on my cell phone.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > I didn't know that
|
| That's good, because that isn't true. Rapuyama has its own
| 128MB of DRAM on the N900.
| noipv4 wrote:
| it was a great phone for light remote admin! The ~ was in a
| weird location though ;)
| MartijnBraam wrote:
| I'm running 5.11 on it though.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| from my experience porting cyanogenMOD from android phones
| that only received 2.3 officially all the way up to 4+, you
| are likely running the binary kernel drivers as binary blobs
| for 2.6 and some kid in a forum either flipped bits at random
| while following a asm tutorial or wrapped it in a syscall
| shell that emulates an old kernel to the driver.
|
| or maybe the n900 had less esoteric peripherals than android
| phones. I don't know... as I never got my hands on one
| despite actively trying to buy one for a couple years when
| they were announced.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Your experience isn't very relevant to N900 then. It's a
| proper GNU/Linux device, the only closed driver blob was
| for the GPU.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| nice. now i feel even more robbed of a decent mobile
| experience, thanks to nokia and tel co's monopolistic
| dealings.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Another PowerVR GPU for those that wonder. They quite
| notoriously don't have any open-source drivers.
|
| There is a lot of information on the net why that's not
| the case, from the GPU architecture to source leaks. One
| could possibly make a shim to load older proprietary
| kernel modules, but it's hardly worth it: PowerVR GPUs
| don't seem to be used much nowadays, in contrast with
| Mali GPUs. And PowerVR GPUs seem to require quite
| different drivers depending on IP customization.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > One could possibly make a shim
|
| That has been done already:
| https://github.com/openpvrsgx-devgroup
| finchisko wrote:
| Still have this little linux phone. It missed compass hw, so map
| experience was not great and also resistive display was inferior
| to iPhone, but still loved it. It's bad Nokia didn't manage it
| create viable platform, but rather switched to Windows phones and
| also died there with broken teeth.
| skykooler wrote:
| One nice thing about the resistive screen is that it's
| pressure-sensitive. This was particularly great for painting
| apps - I remember using one called MyPaint which mapped touch
| pressure to the intensity of your brush stroke, which let me
| draw things that just weren't possible on iPhones of the time.
| u801e wrote:
| They had released the N9 and there was a developer only N950.
| I'm still using my N9 even today though the lock mechanism on
| the SIM holder no longer works.
| gymnodemi wrote:
| Wow, I had to abandon my N9 after all of my fixes including
| buying a new SIM holder failed. I still have my N9 and my
| N900. I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a
| bit longer. It easily beat all of the Android phones at that
| time. I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired and
| the SIM holder wasn't horked.
| kbr2000 wrote:
| I'm still using my N9, and I'm holding my SIM card in place
| using a big rubber band wrapped twice along the longer side
| of the phone :)
|
| Lately the "main" button has been failing, and since
| tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep anymore, I
| can't pick up calls anymore. So to access the phone, I get
| out the SIM and re-insert it.
|
| It's time to abandon it here too, but it was an excellent
| phone in use for almost 10y.
| u801e wrote:
| I don't look forward to the day I have to completely
| abandon it. I have mine set to show the screen when
| double tapping it (which still works better than my Nokia
| 7.2 Android phone).
|
| > since tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep
| anymore, I can't pick up calls anymore.
|
| Mine will show the the screen and prompt me to swipe up
| to answer the call. Does yours work in a different way,
| or is the touch system failing?
| u801e wrote:
| > I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit
| longer
|
| I think we have Stephan Elop to thank for that. I never
| really understood why Nokia didn't just focus on the market
| outside the US. Had they continued producing phones like
| the N9, I'm sure they could have retained a lot of market
| share in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
|
| > I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired
|
| I'm not sure whether all of the CAs had expired, but I
| wonder if it would be possible to get an updated package
| with up to date CAs. The main issue I have is that it can't
| negotiate an agreed upon cipher when trying to establish a
| TLS connection.
|
| I'm still able to use the Firefox browser to browse a
| number of websites like Facebook and Reddit. Hacker news
| still works with the built-in browser. Facebook sometimes
| works with the default browser and the old subdomain reddit
| website will lock up the default browser in my experience
| (the current reddit website layout is a no-go).
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