[HN Gopher] Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago
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Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago
Author : samizdis
Score : 174 points
Date : 2021-08-16 09:28 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dw.com)
| Maakuth wrote:
| Interesting tech choices
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator): Intel
| 80386 CPU, MS-DOS compatible base OS and GEOS shell. Later EPOC-
| based (which became Symbian) products had much less of a PC-like
| tech stack.
| zokier wrote:
| I didn't remember that the early models were DOS based, that
| puts them closer to my favorite 90s portable, the HP 200LX
| Wildgoose wrote:
| I had one of these. Sadly, there was only limited software
| available for it. It was very useful (at that time) to be able
| to receive faxes though.
| noipv4 wrote:
| I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS.
| I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.
| ddalex wrote:
| I see the software keyboard layouts of Maemo everywhere :)
| hargv wrote:
| I would say if you were going to elevate anything after the
| 9000 it should be the Symbian devices- i had a 6600 and a
| friend had a 6630 and those will to me always be the first
| "Smartphones" We played downloaded multiplayer games over
| Bluetooth in school, and though mine didn't have official mp3
| functionality I downloaded the app used on later devices and
| used mine as an mp3 player. Even downloaded a bunch of roms for
| the ngage that ran just fine.
|
| In the end though the peak for me was Windows mobile,
| everything up to 6.5 was literally just a pc in your pocket,
| after that they made the mistake (imo) of trying to compete
| with apple and android for user experience and failed
| miserably. For my part I never wanted the improved UX- a start
| menu style system with a stylus was great for me. Nokias N900
| was great, but in the end too niche to compete with HTC and
| Apple when they were pumping out androids and iPhones. I
| handled purchases at my work for smartphones and gave the HTC
| hero as suggestion for my colleagues since it was simpler and
| got a N900 for myself, and though I liked it a lot android
| certainly went a lot further in the end.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I kept using Symbian until the end, Symbian Belle was quite
| nice, and with PIPS and Qt, Symbian C++ wasn't that bad.
|
| Also jumped into Windows Phones, as its development
| experience was miles ahead (still is) from whatever comes out
| of Google.
|
| With exception of Android, I never needed a "gaming
| rig/server configuration" for mobile development.
|
| Anyway it is what it is.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| I remember picking up a secondhand hp ipaq pocket pc and
| got my mind blown when I realized how easy it is to make an
| app for it. It's basically just plain old winform apps.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nokia Communicator was insane. Telnet/ssh connection was a game
| changer. It was device for professionals, not for mass market.
|
| Selling same core concept to both mass markets and professionals
|
| * has made everything cheaper and more powerful, and
|
| * has decreased input ergonomics for heavy users.
|
| Communicator/Blackberry with hardware keyboards were in some
| sense peak in input ergonomics for accuracy and speed in thumb-
| typing. Now it's just less or more suck with touch screens. I
| don't even bother to install ssh terminal for iPhone because
| easier/faster to carry tiny laptop than suffer the experience.
| ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote:
| i have a web scrapper going to gsmarena.com every day and
| checking if there's a new android phone with keyboard :)
|
| years ago it allowed me to buy the blackberry priv and key2. two
| awesome devices with real keyboards (which also act as touchpads)
|
| But their marketing sucked and both tanked. I think the company
| that licensed the blackberry brand (why?) flopped and there will
| be no more models.
|
| priv was the best one, but is stuck on android 5 or 6 now.
|
| Key2 is still being sold and receiving security updates for
| android 8.
| mnmmn123456 wrote:
| It didn't change the world. The iPhone did 10 years later. I
| guess the article is of interest because it has this wrong claim
| weaved in and even at it's time the "Nokia Communicator" wasn't a
| big success. Maybe we didn't know what FAANG-like success looks
| like at that time and everyone thought "Nokia is such a
| respectable, successful company in Scandinavia". Probably the
| article is of interest now because, we didn't see 2006 (year the
| iPhone came out) and all the years after.
|
| Shrinking a laptop to the size of a telephone wasn't the right
| thing to do.
| asymptosis wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The thought arises:
| what's the motivation for Deutsche Welle to suddenly post an
| article about a derelict Finnish proto-"smartphone"?
| unixhero wrote:
| At the time Nokia was not derelict. It is stated in the
| heading, it is now 25 years ago when Nokia started its path
| to become a global juggernaut.
| asymptosis wrote:
| When did I say Nokia was derelict? Please pay attention to
| what I really wrote.
| [deleted]
| unixhero wrote:
| You apparently never used one.
| asymptosis wrote:
| You seem to have a problem with literacy. The user claims it
| never changed the world (true) and you claim they never used
| one (irrelevant).
| asymptosis wrote:
| When you flag and downvote someone it doesn't make them
| wrong. Feel free to let me know some time what I said which
| was actually incorrect.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| We have all noticed that the world has changed with iOS and
| Android, and we're still trying to recover from that disaster.
| mnmmn123456 wrote:
| We have a free marked and please just buy what you want. Did
| you buy a Nokia?
| bserge wrote:
| Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything
| the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did
| fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely
| ignored consumers.
| soylentcola wrote:
| Yeah...I remember the iPhone release. I was so jealous of the
| capacitive screen and solidly implemented graphics
| acceleration. But compared to the HTC WinMo phone I had at
| the time, it was missing such futuristic capabilities as 3G
| data, GPS for turn-by-turn nav, 3rd party apps, copy/paste,
| MMS, background apps, front camera (although it was less
| important because video calls on 2G was a non-starter), and
| the ability to even change your background or ringer to
| something that didn't ship with the thing.
|
| Definitely glad that others were soon to follow with the more
| modern displays, because the first iPhones themselves were
| like a step back in many other ways compared to the Palms,
| Blackberrys, and PocketPCs of the day.
| bserge wrote:
| At the time I had a Tytn II, which had all of those. Guess
| that's why I never got the iPhone.
| soylentcola wrote:
| I also had one of these (that's what I was referring to).
| Between that and AT&T exclusivity in the US (right after
| all the domestic wiretapping info became public) it just
| wasn't an option for me at the time.
| kokey wrote:
| The problem really at that time and even with PDAs after that
| like the Palm Trio was that mobile data services really sucked in
| most locations where these devices would potentially have done
| really well. The Nokia had additional problems in that the first
| wifi model had terrible battery life and then Nokia started to
| ruin their operating system. Blackberry had the right timing with
| regards to mobile data and right solutions to these problems and
| more including the keyboard and Exchange integration so they did
| really well for a while until Apple disrupted it and Android
| followed.
| zokier wrote:
| I think Nokias 7650 deserves also mention. Launched in 2001/2002
| it arguably laid the foundation for mainstream smartphones, while
| Communicators were inevitably doomed to be niche devices. 7650
| had also many of the hallmarks of modern smartphone, at least
| compared to Communicators which were more of evolutionary dead
| end.
| kiksy wrote:
| Worked with someone who had a 7650. Watching what that could do
| blew me away at the time. First phone I saw that genuinely
| acted like a PC in your pocket. Bought a 6600 as soon as it was
| released and loved it.
|
| You could probably make an interesting article on how much a
| modern smartphone in 2021 differs from the 7650. Fundamentally
| I don't think it's as much as many would think.
| aqsalose wrote:
| Question. I can believe Communicator didn't change "the world".
| However, Deutsche Welle is German broadcaster. How prominent
| Communicator was in Germany?
| dagw wrote:
| The launch event for the Communicator was in Germany, exactly
| 25 years ago yesterday. I guess that in the Germany connection
| here.
| callidus wrote:
| Oh wow. I got one of these second hand as a kid from a family
| friend who upgraded from this model. I was the coolest kid in the
| neighborhood until they realized it didn't do anything "fun".
| erhk wrote:
| Calling the nokia 9000 the first smartphone is disingenuous. It
| fits perfectly the modern connotation of a "dumb" phone.
| neals wrote:
| As a kid, this phone was like my dream gadget, I still remember
| really wanting one and staring at it at the store.
|
| To be honest, I don't know what I wouldv'e done with it, being 12
| years old.
|
| Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a
| calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and
| didn't really use it for anything useful.
|
| I did now just order de Fold 3. Comparable.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and
| a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and
| didn't really use it for anything useful.
|
| Older, I guess, but I still have an Atari Portfolio from 1989
| or so. It still works but I don't use it anymore ; )
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
| jon-wood wrote:
| I have Dyslexia, which in me mostly surfaces as confusion of
| the various theirs, and a writing speed which would result in
| me never completing any class work. I dealt with that by
| learning to type, after which all my work was done on organiser
| type devices, first an Amstrad NC100, and then later on a Psion
| Series 5mx.
|
| The Psion was such a lovely device, it would fit in a large
| pocket, but had a proper keyboard that you could comfortably
| type at a decent speed on. It was also my introduction to
| programming, and so probably indirectly responsible for me
| coming out of school with reasonable grades (having been able
| to actually finish work), and a career I'm still in twenty
| years later.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, me and a friend of mine got one from a shop, I think they
| were like EUR15 or EUR25,- at the time - pretty steep for
| pocket money, but not impossible. I mean we didn't actually use
| it much and since it only had a two line LCD screen, entering
| e.g. school schedules and contact information into it was a bit
| painful, but it was a neat gadget to have.
|
| I have it in the drawer near my PC at the moment, I think I put
| in a battery the other day, still works.
|
| Later on I bought a secondhand Palm V from the internet, I
| think it was EUR25,- that thing was pretty cool and more of the
| 'smartphone' functionality than the organizer; you could
| install apps on it and the like, so Sudoku was a favorite.
| bald wrote:
| yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was
| 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my
| best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool
| to have something that looked like a super small laptop and
| such a wide screen.
| gauravjain13 wrote:
| Exactly my experience! I had a Casio SF-R20 when I was around
| 13 years old, and it was a my first introduction to
| spreadsheets (IIRC the spreadsheet app was called Lucid 3-D).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_organizer#/media/Fi...
| swiley wrote:
| When I was 12 I remember really wanting my dev environment
| (turbo/free pascal) on a PDA but not being able to find one
| with good support. Eventually I got a Zarus but I wasn't good
| enough with Linux to get Free Pascal working on it.
| macintux wrote:
| > The article was updated on August 16,2021. The orginal text
| said the Communicator line was discontinued after thge 9210
| model, which was wrong.
|
| It's depressingly impressive that the correction at the end of
| the article has _three_ typos.
| pedrocr wrote:
| Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia
| dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys
| seemed to be what actually drove that side of the market. The
| Communicator was seen as a curiosity.
| marban wrote:
| I owned every generation of it and so did many of my
| colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More
| like, serious business machine.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made
| sense as connected devices because data services were so
| slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for
| heavy use you were paying by the byte.
|
| The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and
| emails.
|
| I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the
| back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not
| something I'd have been happy doing regularly.
|
| If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers
| they'd have killed this market.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5
|
| The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and
| pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were
| really micro laptops and not large mobiles.
|
| They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or
| Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.
| dejv wrote:
| Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM
| for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa,
| Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a
| client nodes for field representives.
|
| The platform was really limited, app development was
| tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very
| few alternatives.
|
| We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism:
| internet connectivity in places we served were as limited
| as you can imagine and also because of device limitation.
| It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and
| sent to server that merged the data into the master and
| sent you changes back via email as well.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia
| Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course
| the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't
| software compatible...
| antris wrote:
| It was a high-end device for businesses. The price range made
| it almost completely out of the question for regular consumers,
| and it was never meant as a consumer device. But when it was
| introduced in 1996, sending e-mail and fax and being able to
| browse the web on mobile was definitely a huge thing for
| businesses. Mind you, the dial-up internet _just_ had started
| booming a couple of years earlier. The communicator predated
| Blackberries, but continued as a product line until 2007. So
| while the products coexisted in the market, we 're still
| talking about different eras here.
| ollifi wrote:
| I find it interesting that phones never got cheaper but now
| they are more useful so large number of people actually
| consider 1000$ to be ok price to pay for one.
| sofixa wrote:
| They did, there are completely usable phones in the
| 100-200euros segment, which do at least 2/3 of what the 1k
| ones do, albeit more slowly.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where
| 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.
| ollifi wrote:
| Sure there are decent smart phones that only costs 100
| euros, but I was referring to the fact that in 1996
| communicator was deemed too expensive for consumer
| market, but now top of the line iphones sell huge
| volumes.
| antris wrote:
| Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996,
| you never needed the internet to do anything, as our
| society was based on other technologies. People could
| live their lives without the internet, or even without a
| mobile phone and it would be no problem at all.
|
| Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is
| becoming the default way of accessing almost any service,
| so having a phone that works for you is something that
| people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much,
| that people feel like it's not a waste of money.
| dagw wrote:
| You have to remember how ahead of its time the Communicator
| was. The first blackberry device was 3 years away and the first
| one that could make calls was 6 years away when the
| Communicator was released. It might not have been a huge sales
| success, but it did show where the mobile phone market was
| headed years before anybody else.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| I knew a handful of blind communicator users who loved the
| device. Apparently text to speach combined with a query
| keyboard made it significantly more usable than other phones of
| the time (eg for sms or cli).
| Pyramus wrote:
| Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an
| eager user because it became so easy to communicate in
| writing.
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
|
| Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero.
|
| We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think
| I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general
| computing history) that focused on the other elements like the
| relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio
| technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this
| obscure/famous person/device invented the future".
| zelos wrote:
| I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model)
| 9500 and it was _awful_. Sure, it had a browser, but even over
| wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the
| hardware to laughed at it.
|
| Series 80 was a dead end too I think?
|
| Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess
| in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever
| seeing one in use, though.
| Fnoord wrote:
| A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia
| Communicator to remotely administer machines including
| AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or
| while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a
| browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow;
| GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were
| good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small
| keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade
| over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much
| as I could.
|
| I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the
| Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also
| purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a
| slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among
| others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices
| is, like the Planet Gemini's, great.
|
| That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of
| a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became
| popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their
| networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in
| Finland); not so much their smartphones.
| shapefrog wrote:
| It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when
| it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a
| viable mobile phone maker.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Here in Sweden Nokia was a lot more dominant than Blackberry.
|
| My older brother had a Communicator until the lid broke.
|
| Later he had another early smartphone from Spectronics, it was
| controlled with buttons on the sides that you had to learn but
| once you learned them they were very intuitive.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would
| be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).
| raesene9 wrote:
| This article kind of misses out the later Nokia N900, which had
| great hardware, but suffered from Nokia's lack of support (IIRC
| they stopped supporting it about 6 months after launch).
|
| If you like that kind of form factor/functionality, there's
| current devices too like the cosmo communicator
| https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator
| swiley wrote:
| It says debian support is "planned" but I wonder what exactly
| the plan is. Looking around it sounds like a bunch of drivers
| are missing for that SoC, is the plan to re-implement them?
| Wait for the community to re-implement them?
| unnah wrote:
| Another option is https://fxtec.com/ although it doesn't seem
| to have a second screen on the back.
| swiley wrote:
| At least that one has a PMOS wiki page:
| https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1)
| donio wrote:
| It's a slider so it doesn't need the back screen.
|
| For those looking for modern PKB phones the Unihertz Titan
| and the upcoming Titan Pocket are some other good options.
| odiroot wrote:
| N900 was absolutely my favourite out of all phones I owned. It
| felt like such a power-user device.
| fsflover wrote:
| Or Pinephone with a keyboard addon:
| https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote.
| hargv wrote:
| I had an N900- for me one of the main downsides of it was the
| touchscreen, it was fine but with my colleagues all using the
| HTC hero it was frustrating to set their devices up for them
| and see how much nicer the experience was with multitouch.
|
| Very solid device otherwise- i went from an Xperia X1 to the
| N900.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Related, the Neo900 project apparently gave up. Does anyone
| know why?
| wbertberw wrote:
| They had massive organizational problems. At one point years
| ago I received a series of e-mails asking for permission to
| move my preorder funds from one org to another. That's when I
| wrote them off.
| phpnode wrote:
| I still really prefer a hardware keyboard and miss my android G1
| in many ways. I'm typing this on my touch screen phone and it's
| so much slower than texting was even on an ordinary numeric
| keypad with predictive text. For me touch screens ended
| productivity on phones and they solely became consumption devices
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has implement something like the numpad +
| predictive text on a touch screen. It would make a lot of sense
| having less buttons to mis touch.
| afavour wrote:
| There are Android keyboards that replicate it. I tried a few
| but for whatever reason they still couldn't replicate the
| experience. I suspect it's the lack of hard buttons - I could
| type out an entire message without looking at the screen with
| a T9 keypad.
|
| I've ended up switching to a swipe keyboard which I find
| efficient but it in an entirely different way to T9.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have
| ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an
| edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement
| is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown
| editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs
| enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their
| phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to
| be going backwards.
| ljf wrote:
| No I loved those buttons, and find miss-touching a screen so
| much easier! I could bash out messages on my Nokia 8250
| without looking at all, and could type away with the phone in
| my bag. I'd love to know what my typing speed was actually
| like back then, but it sure felt fast!
| y04nn wrote:
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > Such T9 formats for text entry therefore remain available
| in all latest [as of August 2020] iterations of LG keyboards,
| certain Samsung keyboards, and third party T9 keyboards such
| as Go keyboard for Androids and Type Nine for iPhones, as
| shown on this LG V60.
|
| Also, there was another method of touch input that used swipe
| gestures to write words, I can't remember the name, but I
| remember that it was far from intuitive to use.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)#Succes
| sor...
| grishka wrote:
| Back when touchscreen phones were new, Nokia 5800 had a T9
| keyboard you could use instead of qwerty.
| svdree wrote:
| Ah, nostalgia settles in my brain. Old times = good times, at
| least most of the time.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > 25 years since it changed the world
|
| Nokia's Communicator may have been the most capable phone
| computer of the pre iPhone era, but it didn't change the world.
| It was too expensive, too closed, and not well enough marketed to
| change much of anything.
|
| I'm surprised to see it glorified here, not because it wasn't a
| nice piece of visionary tech, but because the company that made
| it had such little impact on changing the world despite
| pioneering the category.
| Zenst wrote:
| I owned one of these, not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded
| if year before. Sure this was an all in one but no, always
| laughed at the ariel and the thing felt like you could almost
| use it as an ice-pick with the ariel folded down and the unit
| closed. But hey, was neat - just the usual issues of these
| open/close designs was the ribbon cable to connect the screen -
| those always seem to fail outside warranty period.
|
| But crux was, this was too dam expensive and heck a few years
| later Blackberry would have it's moment and that did more for
| the market than the Nokia communicator ever did. Heck the IBM
| Simon did more than the Nokia did for pushing things or about
| the same lack-lustre uptake. FWIW I got my communicator for
| free from a friend who orded one and got two with the company
| failing to take back the second one in a period of time that
| made it legally his (he notified in writing so was 3months,
| maybe 6).
|
| I would also ad the Sony P800 was more game changer as well
| than the nokia communicator. Also owned that and for the era -
| pretty darn good.
| dagw wrote:
| _not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded if year before._
|
| The 5MX was released 1999 and the Communicator in 1996. That
| being said, I agree that the 5MX was fantastic piece of
| hardware that in many ways has never been matched.
| zandorg wrote:
| I use an Epoc32 emulator on my PC so I can do Agenda on
| that, and it beeps me my reminders.
|
| I got sick of buying Psion 5's and 5MX's because they
| always broke in 6 months.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It feels a little far-fetched to suggest that one of the
| leading handset manufacturers putting out one of the very first
| "smart devices" had no influence on the future of smart devices
| that followed it, if you ask me.
|
| Yes, they weren't in the hands of every stylish adult or high-
| spending teen, but it wasn't for them. I'd guarantee it
| influenced the thinking of other people building products in
| that category for at least a few years. And in the long run the
| world changed due to that product category.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| The communicator was literally like a toy IBM PC.
|
| Blackberry innovated by shrinking the keyboard to thumb size,
| and making do with a smaller display so it could fit in a
| pocket instead of requiring a handbag.
|
| Those two innovations/ bold compromises over the Communicator
| enabled RIM to discover the first addictive euphoria of an
| always connected social device with the crack berry.
|
| I say "social" but it wasn't really because the app was
| really just email. But RIM got it into the gossip columns
| through Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson, setting the stage for
| the blockbuster device that landed in 2007 when Steve Jobs
| showed everybody what a leap forward into a new category
| could be.
| Zenst wrote:
| Key for blackberry was as you say the one handed keyboard.
| That I would add - great battery life, robust (could drop
| it without expending upon some military tested grade case)
| and above all. They focused on the one internet application
| buisness needed - email on the go.
|
| That right there gave them a winner in those early days.
|
| Now what gave Blackberry there consumer base was the PIN
| messaging which was a basic chat system that was simple and
| effective, something a bit more for those that grew up on
| SMS to engage with and they did.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'd hazard to say that Nokia 3210 changed the world more.
| Affordable, reliable, simple, it had everything to make cell
| phones the norm of everyone's pedestrian, daily life.
| markstos wrote:
| I remember around 1997 I was reading my raw web site logs and saw
| the Nokia 9000 user agent appear. I knew what it was but never
| saw one in person.
|
| I wondered what some rich person was doing reading my website,
| probably about skateboarding back then.
| sumedh wrote:
| It was probably the rich guy's son.
| crawsome wrote:
| "ugly but revolutionary"
|
| every damn tech author has it built in to hate on old tech and
| QWERTY. Screw them all, id take a snapdragon in an "ugly" but
| massively functional form factor (like the one on the right) over
| these garbage screen-bars with trash virtual keyboards.
| metafunctor wrote:
| Functional software is, I believe, what you would be missing.
| It's amazingly rare (and I'm not trying to make the point that
| current incumbents always have great software).
| nine_k wrote:
| I suspect that the majority of users are not fans of typing in
| any form. Many of them immediately press the dictation button
| and tell the phone what they'd like to see. Many people's idea
| of cool or fun is totally _not_ an office in their pocket, but
| rather a TV / music player / camera / game console. Plus a
| phone, of course, for talking by voice.
|
| The target audience of Nokia 9000, people like you or me, are
| long since not the target audience of flagship smartphones.
| Bluetooth keyboards, 11" laptops, or some highly custom and
| expensive hardware are the choices for a proper "mobile office"
| today.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Nokia 9000 may be a landmark but nothing impressed more than the
| day I saw N900 running OpenOffice. I knew it was not a good idea,
| but that deeply impressed me.
| fsflover wrote:
| Librem 5 smartphone runs a desktop GNU/Linux with desktop apps.
| You can even connect a keyboard and screen to it.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of
| every single model of those, and they were some of the best
| hardware I ever used.
|
| The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while
| sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.
|
| In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage
| box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close
| to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500, even though
| the design principles were pretty advanced for that time.
|
| (I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of
| what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo
| tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop)
|
| But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today
| in some usable, non-niche form.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Being at Nokia Networks during that last phase, I could observe
| in first person how many of those things went.
|
| Nokia used to have internal shows to get employees feedback for
| future products, Maemo not having a radio modem was a common
| remark, naturally they couldn't add it due to Symbian.
|
| Also think that Elop gets more blame than he deserves, as many
| see his connection to Microsoft and not the bonus from Nokia's
| own management board.
|
| NetAct versus other networking products, also suffered from the
| same culture issues, by the way.
| amonavis wrote:
| Even today NetAct remains a hot mess.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Looking back, the way OSS Middleware was supposed to reboot
| NetAct, was the wrong approach, we had better just rewrite
| everything in better C++ without the Perl/CORBA stuff, but
| many pieces were at play.
|
| Not much else I can talk openly about it.
| senko wrote:
| Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult
| following for years after.
|
| Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo
| after only a few months - either the stupidest move in history
| or result of internal power struggles - and force-marrying it
| with Intel's Moblin (itself a decent mobile OS) to create
| unholy mess that was Meego.
|
| The book (btw awesome find, gonna read it at the first chance I
| get!) agrees with my recollection of the events:
|
| > The operating system was named Maemo. As soon as it was
| permitted to be fitted on a phone, that first Maemo smartphone
| was a reasonable success. It attracted a community of open
| source developers who created Maemo apps. With 12,000 members,
| this was the largest mobile developer community in the world.
| Then Nokia did something remarkable. It partnered with the chip
| manufacturer Intel, and the two companies renamed Maemo to
| MeeGo.
|
| Consider Maemo was Debian-based, using GTK, and Moblin was
| RedHat-based, using QT. It not only meant Nokia had to rewrite
| its proprietary UI and repackage everything, it also threw all
| the thriving dev community under the bus.
| wbertberw wrote:
| > not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and
| repackage everything
|
| this is half-correct. Maemo->Meego did shift from GTK to QT,
| but they kept the Debian packaging on the N9 (the only device
| to ship with Meego)
| senko wrote:
| You're right, tho I believe that was only intended as a
| halfway step (so even more breakage, yay!).
| phire wrote:
| Still better than Meego, which they discontinued like 8
| months before releasing the N9, the first and last meego
| device.
| slim wrote:
| Meego is Maemo + Moblin if I remember correctly. It's the
| frakenstein monster he's talking about
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I
| had in a 9500
|
| You're right, but you're going to upset a whole bunch of people
| who think that what people wanted was Debian on a phone, and
| are uninterested in hearing the last 10 years of market
| evidence to the contrary.
| bartread wrote:
| Out of interest I just had a look on eBay to see what Nokia
| 9500s go for and... wow. The answer is, kind of, proper money.
| As in, hundreds of pounds for unlocked models in good
| condition. Might not sound like that much in an era where
| premium flagship phones typically cost PS1000-1500, but still
| pretty nuts for a phone that was released all the way back in
| 2004. I guess for a retro collector with the right sort of
| fetish this is reasonable[0].
|
| _[0] Btw, I 'm absolutely not dissing this: I have my own
| fetish - something of a thing for old synths, particularly
| those of the early-ish digital era in the 80s that are still
| fairly affordable, and recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum
| machine... from Australia. It wasn't _that_ expensive, but it's
| a similar level of expenditure. I love old analogue synths too:
| I just can't afford them and, with these, because they're a bit
| more sexy and fashionable than the digital options, you can
| often pick up much less expensive modern day reproductions and
| homages._
| tyingq wrote:
| >The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while
| sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.
|
| I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a
| work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a
| terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a
| shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and
| triumphant all at once :)
| jareklupinski wrote:
| Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over
| ssh on my Blackberry Storm...
|
| At that time I felt the future of system administration meant
| taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and
| abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like
| "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".
| reaperducer wrote:
| In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony
| phone (maybe an M600c -- the one from the James Bond film),
| while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time
| I thought, "The future is finally here!"
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yes, but I was doing that on a 9110, I think. Had a decent
| terminal if I wanted to use telnet :)
| christkv wrote:
| The cosmo is a sort of attempt towards the communicators
| https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator
| netfortius wrote:
| I appreciated the N900 (still have one), but Nokia caught my
| eye and then interest in the smartphone area before that, as I
| bought an E61 in an airport in Germany, while on my way back to
| the US. Once back to work I configured it as skinny (SCCP,
| actually) client to my Cisco CUCM, and amazed all my peers
| about being able to pick up my phone extension, over WiFi, on
| my cell phone. And then all the other things you could do with
| it ...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I'd love to have a tin-foil hat device like that today, to make a
| stance in public against surveillance economy and mindless
| consumption. LCD, removable battery, GBA-like bulkiness, and
| other retro traits helping with power efficiency and
| sustainability would be a plus, too.
| mnmmn123456 wrote:
| GBA = Gameboy Advanced
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Game Boy Advance
| Fnoord wrote:
| Pinephone will have a hardware keyboard _and_ has a user-
| replaceable, removable battery.
|
| PS: if you want to make a stance, go back to analog world ;-)
| zibzab wrote:
| If openness is your thing, you can get a N900 and run a your
| own Linux on it. Or you can try getting the developers phone
| N950 on ebay, which has more recent hardware.
|
| If I was forced to use an old Nokia as my daily driver, I would
| probable use a 5800 instead.
| amarsahinovic wrote:
| This might be interesting (although it does not tick all of
| your boxes) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-
| slide-5g-transforme...
| fsflover wrote:
| Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and
| https://pine64.org/pinephone.
|
| FAQ about the first one:
| https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-
| wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I know this is off-topic but wow, following your links I just
| read this on the Puri.sm site:
|
| > Introducing Librem AweSIM: > Unlimited talk, text, and data
| for just $99/mo
|
| "just"? Really? Isn't that _awefully_ expensive?!
|
| I have a plan with ulnimited talk, text, and 40GB of data
| that I use extensively (including for a lot of youtube
| videos) and I've never hit this limit. I pay EUR8/mo for
| that. For people who would need even more data, there are
| 200GB plan for less than EUR20/mo.
| pavlov wrote:
| American mobile phone subscriptions are all ridiculously
| expensive compared to Europe, so the baseline is
| different...
|
| Even then, $99 USD/month is about twice what you'd pay with
| a regular carrier.
| fsflover wrote:
| 1. You don't have to buy the AweSIM. You can use any sim-
| card with this phone, there is no lock.
|
| 2. This is not _just_ a cellular service provider:
|
| _Librem AweSIM adds an extra layer of privacy to your
| customer data to protect you from targeted tracking. We
| register your phone number in our name on your behalf and
| keep your personal and financial data private and out of
| the hands of companies who would sell it to others._
|
| From https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Is it actually unlimited data though? It doesn't say if
| they throttle at high usage, that'd be a dealbreaker for
| me.
| nsizx wrote:
| The laws of my country already make it illegal for my
| mobile provider to take my private data and sell it away.
| fsflover wrote:
| This is US-only anyway. But apart from the data selling,
| there are also leaks.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation.
| amelius wrote:
| How well do the Android apps run on it (using Anbox)? I'd
| need that for running my banking app.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://puri.sm/posts/anbox-on-the-librem-5/
|
| Also, see the FAQ.
| danhor wrote:
| Do note that many banking apps use google safetynet, which
| means they won't work on anything that deviates too much
| from normal android and it won't work on anbox.
| amelius wrote:
| :(
| fsflover wrote:
| This is exactly why one needs to make a stance in public
| against surveillance economy. The government and banks
| should not support the duopoly.
| swiley wrote:
| I still haven't gotten anbox to work but I also realized
| every single app that I used besides Snapchat had a website
| that worked well (including my banking app.) Some banking
| apps apparently include a TOTP implementation, this is a
| trivial algorithm and there are many native Linux apps for
| it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Lots of people building customized, hacker-friendly
| "cyberdecks" these days. Just pick your favorite.
| cherselle wrote:
| It's quite a trip on the memory lane when I am still using Nokia
| as my phone. The times when Nokia was the giant of the phone
| industry. But due to the rapid technological advancements, they
| struggle in the smartphone revolution, and since then, there has
| been a power shift in the industry.
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(page generated 2021-08-16 23:01 UTC)