[HN Gopher] Nokia N900 Necromancy
___________________________________________________________________
Nokia N900 Necromancy
Author : yaky
Score : 457 points
Date : 2025-12-12 00:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yaky.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (yaky.dev)
| shmerl wrote:
| Nokia was so cool, before Android only SoCs swamped everything
| and it became impossible to run normal upstream Linux stack on
| phones because no one provides open drivers for a whole bunch of
| stuff.
| xiaomai wrote:
| I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet
| tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.
| xp84 wrote:
| There are DOZENS OF US!
|
| Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch
| to Cingular and pay _thirty dollars_ for a data plan! " (Keep
| in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!)
|
| I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip
| phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like
| LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have
| worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to admit by
| 2008 that I wanted a smartphone instead of this second device
| with a stylus.
|
| In those days though, browsing the web as though you were on a
| desktop was thought to be the goal to aspire to. Even the
| iPhone launched with the default behavior in Safari being
| showing whole desktop webpages, and you zoomed in to the parts
| you wanted to use. It took a year or two for people to figure
| out 'responsive' and within 4 years most sites were starting to
| be designed for small portrait screens. At that point the
| landscape N800 style was at a disadvantage since the mobile
| sites being designed to be a little leaner, were the wrong
| layout, but the desktop sites were pretty heavy for a mobile
| device to handle. And as "apps" ate the world that probably put
| the final nail on our little N-series.
| thesandlord wrote:
| I remember running around campus looking for WiFi hotspots
| with my N810, using Google Voice to text my friends ($0.10
| per text, no thank you!). Learned so much Linux admin skills
| that became so useful later in life. Favorite device ever!
| Eventually moved to Android smartphones but the ease of
| hacking, the amazing community (internettablettalk.com, looks
| like its gone now :( unfortunately...)
| hexnuts wrote:
| You could always get something like a PinePhone.
| vel0city wrote:
| Back in the day I just had a cheap dumb phone with the $15/mo
| unlimited 3G data add-on and popped that SIM into whatever
| other device I was feeling at the time. It seemed like if it
| wasn't a common phone in the US, Cingular/AT&T never noticed.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Good article i enjoyed it.
| internet2000 wrote:
| Buddy, just buy a replacement battery
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=BL-5J
| yaky wrote:
| I looked, but TBH, not sure what to make of "genuine" and "OEM"
| claims for a battery for a 16-year-old device (or 10-year-old
| if you count compatible Lumias). Descriptions usually do not
| mention manufacture dates either.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > not sure what to make of "genuine" and "OEM" claims for a
| battery for a 16-year-old device
|
| They're lies, but the batteries work. There were Chinese
| lines manufacturing knockoff BL-5Js, and there may still be
| one or two, or just a bunch of crates filled with old ones.
| Source: still use an N900, but just for podcasts.
|
| > 10-year-old if you count compatible Lumias
|
| Worse, those Lumia BL-5Js aren't actually compatible. The
| slots cut into the battery aren't wide enough to fit into the
| N900. Unless you're willing to cut apart the battery itself,
| they're useless.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can
| still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere?
|
| Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on
| N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back
| cover.
|
| The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I
| have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some
| damage in my pocket and got a small crack in its bottom middle.
| Touch still works perfectly though, so I'm not in a hurry :D
| j16sdiz wrote:
| > The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a
| phone.
|
| It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated
| quickly around the world
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Should still be fine for at least a few years here.
| gbil wrote:
| Depends on the country and provider but is sooner than
| later in Europe and I hate it that 2G is going away since
| all my old devices are not going to work again...
|
| https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/
| bigiain wrote:
| Here in Australia 3G is totally gone already. 2G went
| years ago.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| That article is full of made up slop - at least in terms
| of Europe.
|
| Most of the dates stated are just plain wrong.
|
| The UK dates are completely wrong - by 5 years in most
| cases.
|
| All of the UK's 2G networks are still running, and the
| last won't be switched off until at least 2030.
| gbil wrote:
| The article is from 2022 and is good enough summary.
| Specifics for sure can vary in between but that is why
| you are more than able to do an individual search.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Can I broadcast my own 3G cell inside my house with some
| magic radio device?
| yaky wrote:
| I've only heard of doing so for 2G:
| https://hackaday.com/2025/10/06/2g-gone-bring-it-back-
| yourse...
| bigiain wrote:
| Not legally. Where I'm from they sold off the old 3G
| spectrum and frequencies, mostly (all?) to established
| telcos to use in 4G or 5G mobile services. They will not be
| happy if you start interfering with their customers there
| (especially not after the money they spent at the auction
| for those licenses).
|
| There are some weird bits of the 900MHz band that cross
| into the fairly free-to-use ISM bands in some countries,
| and I recall a CCC talk where someone demonstrated a SDR
| setup doing mobile phone base station stuff by sneaking
| into what were ISM bands in Germany where he was that
| handsets would talk to because they were allocated as
| cellular phone spectrum in other parts of the world. Here
| in Australia we are limited and can't use the upper end of
| the 920MHz ISM band with LoRa devices, because Optus bought
| that spectrum for their phone network.
|
| (Here in Aust4ralia we have other cellular spectrum and
| phone network problems, where a lot of older devices that
| support some 4 and/or 5G cannot reliably call 000 (our
| equivalent emergency number to the US 911), because the
| fall back to 3G when roaming onto other networks... A few
| people have died recently, and all the telcos are busy
| blocking a growing list of phones, mostly older Samsung
| ones if the noise in mainstream media here is accurate. I
| know my old but still otherwise functional Galaxy S6 Edge
| is not on the banned list.)
| 71bw wrote:
| The last paragraph definitely sums up how much of a
| bureaucratic and dystopian joke Australia is. Should have
| kept 2G up!
| anthk wrote:
| Europe can use 433 and 866 MHZ for ISM.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Not sure about 3G, but here's an example of 2G:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMWvA4Ty1Wk
|
| Edit: same as already posted hackaday, oop!
| dm319 wrote:
| Yes, there was such a thing called Vodafone SureSignal and
| similar devices:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vodafone-075375-Sure-
| Signal-V3/dp/B...
| daemonologist wrote:
| I apologize for being that guy, but they are being
| _deprecated_. To depreciate is to decrease in value.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| but then, deprecation causes depreciation in this case, for
| extra fun.
| secult wrote:
| In Europe we keep 2G as a failsafe, deprecating only 3G.
| gbil wrote:
| nope, check the link I posted in another comment:
| https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/#europe
|
| please note that the list is not fully up to date, eg. in
| Germany Voda and Telekom have said that they will sunset 2G
| in summer 2028.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Not true, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out
|
| Many countries/carriers in europe have already shut down
| 2G, many will shut it down in 2027. A few will keep it a
| few years more.
| officialchicken wrote:
| It's a hot mess too. When you have an American carrier /
| phone number on an international plan and they shut down
| all radios in the case of an emergency in the EU, you
| still get 2G/3G service abroad while everyone's phones
| around you is dead.
| SahAssar wrote:
| What do you mean? They are shutting down the radio
| transceivers for 2G/3G, how would an American
| number/carrier get a signal in countries that have shut
| down their 2G/3G networks? Or are you talking about plans
| to do direct-to-cell satellite service, cause none of
| those are 2G/3G as far as I can tell?
|
| The whole point is to free up spectrum, how would that
| work if that spectrum is still in use for the American
| carriers in countries that shut down the service for
| domestic use? Why would service be maintained for such a
| niche usecase?
| systemtest wrote:
| A bit of a shame. I had a Nokia 6090 with 8 watt of
| transmit power on 900Mhz. Combined with a 33 centimeter
| antenna that phone had reception in nearly all of the
| European continent. And with a 70Ah 12v battery you had a
| battery life of weeks. Even with the phone consuming up
| to 25 watts during calls.
|
| My fancy new 5G smartphone doesn't work in rural parts of
| the country. We are going backwards.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I wish... https://techsverige.se/en/2024/01/sverige-
| slacker-2g-och-3g-...
| yaky wrote:
| Where's the fun in that?
|
| Maemo wiki states that Maemo Leste should be run from SD card.
| I am actually surprised that the phone can use the SD slot at
| high enough speed.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I agree that fun is enough of a reason, but treating the
| battery contacts with 5V seems like a rather sadistic kind of
| fun to me :P
| Retr0id wrote:
| > it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover
|
| Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Yes it does (based on a hall sensor), though looking up it
| turns out that it's actually the Nokia's kernel that does it,
| so other OSes may not do it.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Yep, I remember there being a magnet hack placed on the
| kickstand so that it would be detected properly
| cl3misch wrote:
| I think OP wants it to be an always-on device. The last
| sentence in the post is
|
| > Nokia N900 enjoying its new life as an online radio device
| using Open Media Player.
|
| But I agree with your sentiment. Using supercaps seems
| overengineered to me if the device is connected anyway.
| yaky wrote:
| It can't be used in a mobile way much anymore, with all 3G
| and many 2G shut down in the US.
|
| The caps / supercaps are necessary to provide enough current
| during boot or more resource-intensive tasks.
| space_ghost wrote:
| I loved my N900. Enough that I eventually replaced it with an N9.
| It wasn't the same, tho. The N900 had a certain charm.
| distances wrote:
| It wasn't the same, but I had both and really loved the N9. My
| all-time favourite phone.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Man, I miss my N80ie. The towns I lived in didn't get UMTS/3G
| until the '10s, but the EDGE radios were _enough_. Loved Symbian,
| miss it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| My first Internet phone was the Nokia 9000, which was limited
| to GSM (9600bps). I built and debugged one of the first major
| music streaming services on that connection because I was
| working remote and my DSL got cut off. I had to add a 2Kbps
| stream option to the production servers for myself just so I
| could test it.
| rboyd wrote:
| is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint?
| badass phone
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yes! I was so excited he had that phone in the movie.
|
| They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in
| the production must have owned one of these phones.
| Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong"
| way -- they would put the external screen to their face,
| like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the
| back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| N900 has nothing to do with Symbian.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Fortunately - Symbian was painful. It was designed with a
| half-baked C++ standard and devices with 1-2 MB of RAM in
| mind and apparently never thoroughly upgraded.
| bpiroman wrote:
| Seeing this makes me wanna get the Blackberry passport!!! And
| boot linux on it
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Check out the Hackberry designs from ZitaoTech. They're pretty
| amazing. I'm currently in the process of porting Plasma Mobile
| onto the device so that there's a better UI for it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I had one of these around 2011! Used it to host a websocket
| server - a novelty at the time - during a conference talk, and it
| held up to 30+ clients before dying.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I still have an N800-tough, it still works. It even holds a five
| day charge. This is from after the reboot, it runs linux and so
| far it has been ultra reliable. I have an older one as well that
| still works but this one is just a little more useful (it can
| serve as a wifi access point).
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| N9000 was so ahead of it's time.
| patrakov wrote:
| No, it belonged to an alternative universe - and, arguably, a
| better one.
| Nursie wrote:
| > A quick glance at the forums also confirms that USB port was
| poorly designed and is prone to breaking.
|
| That was the death of mine. I had an external battery charger
| that I could use to charge the machine overnight, but it was too
| much of a hassle so it got recycled and I moved on to a Galaxy
| Note, which everyone laughed at for being enormous but now look
| at us, the base iPhone 17 is around the same size...
|
| The N900 was a great little device, it was like having a tiny
| computer with full keyboard in my pocket. It's just a shame the
| built-in FM transmitter didn't work reliably, because I used it
| to listen to music in the car a lot.
|
| It was also amazing to be able to download the whole world's map
| data (such as it was in 2010) to the device, so the GPS
| navigation still worked off-grid (deep-outback Australia in 2010
| was not always that good for data connections).
| specialp wrote:
| I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the
| iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript
| and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You
| could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you
| want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish
| company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio
| Angry Birds
| internet2000 wrote:
| Web browsing wasn't a particular strength of it. I remember the
| N900's browser came with a version of Gecko around a year old
| by the time. Flash support was a downside. And of course,
| contemporary iPhones ran circles around it in smoothness.
| asveikau wrote:
| I seem to recall they received criticism for going with gecko
| when the rest of the industry was getting behind WebKit.
| vvpan wrote:
| I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| I recall there was a project to revive the N900 with modern
| internals, anyone know what happened to it?
| yaky wrote:
| There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up
| though: https://neo900.org/#main
| Arch-TK wrote:
| It wasn't really abandoned so much as killed by PayPal.
|
| The project used PayPal to gather downpayments, PayPal
| decided to lock the funds for months (almost a year or maybe
| longer IIRC) because they saw money coming in but no
| confirmation of goods coming out. And, you know, when it
| comes to big companies, no explanation is sufficient, you are
| guilty of something because some heuristic said so, so the
| funds were locked, legal threats didn't work (try threatening
| a company with the power of a small/medium country), and by
| the time they got their money back, key people who were going
| to work at a discount to cover key milestones had moved on.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This seems like weird revisionist history or I missed
| something. I never got a dime back that I spent on the
| Neo900, which I assumed they spent on their personal
| lifestyles and travel while trying and failing to design
| and manufacture a board.
|
| If there was actually a holdup of funds that killed the
| project, and eventually the funds were released, that's an
| even worse story. I didn't think there could be a worse
| story. It would mean that the project fell apart while they
| were waiting on cash, then when they got it they just
| treated it like a personal windfall. IIRC I ended up out
| $1.5K on the thing.
| Retr0id wrote:
| oof that soldering is not pretty, but hey, if it works!
| smashah wrote:
| N900 remains the best phone I've ever owned. Learnt so much with
| it.
| devmor wrote:
| Oh I miss this era of early smartphones. My life for a physical
| slide out keyboard on the iPhone.
| andai wrote:
| Can someone explain the use of super capacitors here? Do they
| function as a battery?
| picture wrote:
| It's because the phone design needs the battery to help
| stabilize the voltage under load. As we know, digital devices
| can nearly instantaneously change the amount of current they
| consume and thus require layers of energy storage to
| accommodate the transient currents quickly. However, the
| changing current consumption doesn't just happen briefly. It
| sometimes continues to ramp for more than milliseconds (a
| glacial time frame for modern electronics). Thus generally
| every component in the power supply network of a design serves
| some stabilization and filtering role, including the batteries.
|
| It appears that in this case, as the original battery aged, its
| internal apparent resistance (ESR) increased beyond the
| original design expectations, to a point where the phone won't
| work when plugged in to a charging cable because despite the
| charging cable most likely being able to deliver sufficient
| power at DC, it had too much impedance to supply it quickly
| enough. When current is demanded from a source that has too
| high impedance to supply it, the voltage drops. This will
| result in significant voltage ripple to the power supply of the
| digital circuits, which can cause logic to not function
| correctly.
|
| Adding a large capacitor basically replaced the filtering and
| stabilization role of the original battery.
|
| Interestingly people often intentionally remove capacitors for
| side channel measurements and glitching attacks.
| jsmailes wrote:
| Fascinating, thanks for explaining! I had assumed it was just
| that capacitors were easier to get hold of than batteries,
| and that the author was just putting up with a reduced
| "battery" life as a result. It makes sense to replace with
| capacitors if they're just using it for always-powered static
| applications -- probably with much lower fire risk to boot.
| antran22 wrote:
| I'm just wondering if there is any real modern pocket cyberdeck
| with the form factor of those old phones, with a slide out
| physical keyboard.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The folk who left Psion tried to resurrect the Psion 3/5 form
| factor a few times as an Android phone with a fairly decent
| keyboard, but I don't think they're still around (or that it's
| cheap enough to justify getting one).
| jrmg wrote:
| Seem to still be around!
|
| https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all
| SahAssar wrote:
| I think the F(x)tec Pro1 might fit the bill, but getting it to
| run real linux might be a challenge.
|
| Planet Computers Astro Slide 5G also sounds like it could work.
| sollewitt wrote:
| The N900 was my peak "mobile computing is awesome" device.
|
| I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the
| alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my
| Finnish is not up to that.
|
| I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay,
| successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor
| to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
|
| The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the
| cyberpunk "deck" idea in that thing, it was great.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly
| needing someone's permission.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two
| internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with
| Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-
| maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the
| cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear
| will be.
|
| I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only
| allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root
| by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
| eru wrote:
| > I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like,
| only allow connections from rooted devices?
|
| Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
| girvo wrote:
| Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and
| it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I
| live
| Sharlin wrote:
| It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones
| of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Not directed at you, but what kind of person would [flag]
| and [dead] the other reply to your comment? Talk about not
| having a life!
|
| As for the N9, it still has the most modern and beautiful
| GUI of any smart device, 15 years after being discontinued.
| It will take at least 15 more years for iOS or Android to
| reach that level, if ever. The physical design was also
| very nice and refined.
|
| For those who don't believe me:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY
| pessimizer wrote:
| I always thought that flagging would get the comment put
| into a review queue (one that would put even your ability
| to flag at risk), but it seems that mass flagging gets
| you an automated flagkill of late. People can get
| flagkilled for not sufficiently loving particular
| products or for not being orthorexic enough.
|
| As for the N900, I just wanted one or two more hardware
| iterations (the design flaws were annoying, and a couple
| mentioned in the OP.) The N9 looked great, but I couldn't
| get over the loss of the keyboard (although of course
| that was our dictated future.) The Meego transition
| seemed unnecessary and annoying (not the UI changes, but
| everything else), especially the move to rpms from debs.
| They were just hostile to Debian mainline for some
| reason; if they had been less hostile, their work would
| have survived without a break even after Elop
| intentionally tanked the company. That proprietary moat
| is just irresistible.
|
| iOS and Android literally grabbed the designers of
| Maemo/Meego and WebOS to update their horrible UIs. Back
| then, they were still even refusing to multitask. Android
| copied WebOS almost exactly.
| officeplant wrote:
| >Not directed at you, but what kind of person would
| [flag] and [dead] the other reply to your comment? Talk
| about not having a life!
|
| Going by the username having a near slur in it. Probably
| that.
| gspr wrote:
| Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It
| doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water.
| It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband - I'd rather just
| connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the
| complications of having a whole extra computer in there.
|
| _Surely_ this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or
| a niche company?
| imp0cat wrote:
| Have you seen the Jolla preorder? It was on hn a few days
| ago. That is the spiritual successor of the N9XX line.
|
| https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
| tincholio wrote:
| It's excciting, but I saw a review of a pre-release c2 on
| youtube [0] the other day, and it seemed extremely slow
| in the interactions. Otherwise, it seems like a cool
| device.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/5titW5dclwg
| linmob wrote:
| The C2 is a different device than the new one linked
| above, which was way more affordable (~250 Euro) with a
| 4G Unisoc SoC.
| mrmlz wrote:
| I loved my N9. But i'm somewhat hesitant on preordering
| that one. I need wireless charging.. And i still dont
| really get if Android-apps actually work or not, i.e.
| swedish Bank-Id/Swish etc.
| gspr wrote:
| I'd actually prefer one running a normal Linux. It's a
| travesty that certain things in daily life require
| Android or iOS, and that's a fight I'll keep fighting,
| but the idea of a tiny Linux laptop in my pocket is just
| so tempting.
| mrmlz wrote:
| Sure i can join you on the barricade, but i still want to
| function in a society :(
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You can have another device for your banking.
| imp0cat wrote:
| I think this is the way. The Jolla device does have some
| Android compatibility layers, but I am sure banking apps
| will not like that.
| best_answer wrote:
| Here you can see Sailfish OS banking app compatibility:
| https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-
| os/1...
| gspr wrote:
| Promising! Thanks!
| henearkr wrote:
| I don't see any keyboard or stylus in that Jolla.
|
| For me that is not even in the same league than the N900.
| mpol wrote:
| There is the Gemini PDA from 2018 which has a physical
| keyboard. I heard it was mostly a disappointment.
|
| There was another phone with keyboard around the same
| time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very
| much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-
| up, the Nokia Lauta.
|
| All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego
| from Nokia.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Mostly a disappointment? The keyboard is fantastic. I can
| tell because I have a Cosmo Communicator (successor with
| 4G) and Astro Slide (successor with slide mechanic and
| 5G). The keyboard of these is great, but... they got
| barely no support, and the company who build these is
| like AWOL. Either way, like the GPD Pocket series, the
| keyboard is larger compared to the Nokia N900 (3G) and
| Nokia N810 (WLAN only)
|
| > There was another phone with keyboard around the same
| time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very
| much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-
| up, the Nokia Lauta.
|
| Probably F(x)tec and their successors. Those have a
| similar small keyboard as Nokia N900 and Nokia N810
|
| There's also the Hackberry. This device uses a real
| Blackberry keyboard, with custom firmware. It works
| together with a 3D printed case, and a RPi CM5. This
| keyboard, while small, is very ergonomic.
| girvo wrote:
| I haven't, and I don't need one, but I'm going to buy one
| anyway (though its likely not allowed on Australia
| networks _sigh_ )
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is absolutely doable by a niche company. The problem
| is that you need to run this _as a business_. What plagues
| every free /open/libre project is that they're not run as a
| business; so they get distracted in all different
| directions trying to cater to ideals about free/libre
| licensing and so on, and end up missing the big picture.
|
| You need to operate this as a business _first_ , with the
| freedom part being a nice bonus. Nobody cares how free your
| thing is if it's dead on arrival and gets beaten by an
| entry-level smartphone.
|
| Make a competitive product. Nowadays that could very well
| just mean Android with manufacturer-sanctioned root access
| and preinstalled terminal & X/wayland server for those who
| want to run desktop apps.
|
| The Jolla phone someone linked below actually looks like a
| decent product. The Android app support means it's actually
| usable in the modern world, and the specs look competitive.
| gspr wrote:
| Maybe you're right. But at the same time I _feel_ (based
| on nothing) that even the performance of an entry-level
| Android phone, coupled with libre hardware and software,
| and a tiny little keyboard like the N900 's, running an
| ordinary Linux distro, actually would find a market. A
| small market made up of us weirdos who find this HN
| thread interesting.
|
| But then again, experience shows I'm wrong.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A bit on the larger size, but this already exists:
| https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket
| LtWorf wrote:
| A small laptop which needs wifi? And?
| Fnoord wrote:
| I recommend against GPD, since they're from Hong Kong /
| China and their warranty is terrible.
|
| If you do decide to buy one, the hardware (of the Pocket
| 2 at least) is OK. Easy to open and such. You can even
| buy replacement battery. Buy one from Amazon in EU if you
| can, they have to provide 2 years warranty, at least.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "You need to operate this as a business _first_ , [...]
| Make a competitive product."
|
| Not only that, but you should not get suckered down into
| overcomplicating things by chasing complex novelties, e.
| g. _integrated_ slider- or clamshell-implemented
| keyboards, silly and outdated form factors (clamshell
| UMPCs, OQO already showed the way), etc.
|
| You want a good, small keyboard? Design it to be
| _attachable_. This is possible in a variety of ways and
| can be adapted to your manufacturing expertise. It also
| leaves open third-party hardware support for _your_
| device. Not to mention maintainability /repairability.
| It's utterly puzzling to me how many hardware start-ups
| already fuck up the basics.
|
| And never forget: In a satured market, even catering to a
| niche, means you should go for a somewhat unique feature
| set. How many ultramobile devices are out there that are
| truly accessible and usable? That goes beyond just safety
| or repairability.
|
| OLED screen? I'd rather prefer something PWM-free.
| Precision control? Digitizer/stylus support. You don't
| even need to house the stylus in the device. But it would
| be _very_ useful to have at least one. Audio? Yeah, 3.5
| mm is a must. Dedicated, easy-access mSD (Express) card
| slot? Yes, please. Exchangeable batteries? Good idea, as
| long as it 's a standard design in good supply. Kill
| switches. Maybe a modular camera set up like those
| Chinese flagships that are otherwise rather useless.
| Full-feature connectivity (1-2 x USB 4). Etc.
| Fnoord wrote:
| > You want a good, small keyboard? Design it to be
| attachable.
|
| Get one of the BB + USB-C keyboards available.
| amelius wrote:
| Because banking apps will not want to run on it, basically.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not sure that has to be a deal breaker. I'd be happy
| to have the banking apps on an old iphone I left at home.
| mbirth wrote:
| Planet Computers Gemini? Or their Cosmo Communicator? (To
| be fair they're more Psion 5-sized.)
|
| Or do you remember the Beepberry/Beeper?
|
| OTOH, your phone is more than capable, so maybe a small
| bluetooth keyboard is all you really need. There are apps
| like iSH on iOS or Termux on Android that give you a Linux
| shell.
| testfrequency wrote:
| My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the
| first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have
| subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien
| monologue scenes.
|
| It wasn't until I was at a friends home who had it playing in
| the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we
| knew what the aliens were saying...lo and behold, there's
| subtitles.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who
| rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
| Tor3 wrote:
| My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have
| used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G
| disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as
| others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still.
| Mechanically it was as good as new as well.
|
| As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I
| usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had
| my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite
| minicomputer editor on my N900.
| fragmede wrote:
| Have you seen the GPD pocket 4? There's a 4G option, but
| unfortunately not one for 5G (yet?)
|
| https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2
| larodi wrote:
| It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900
| predated iPhone if I remember correctly.
|
| But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux
| for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian
| experience, which also was week though when it came to user
| apps.
|
| The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly
| fast.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| The underlying OS makes no difference.
|
| BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of
| Posix.
|
| What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most
| expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the
| point it came out they had something like 23 years of very
| high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the
| reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year
| as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too.
|
| Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing
| you'll spend money on.
|
| Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn
| Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI
| was along the lines of "But I like it without all the
| wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least
| needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they
| weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
| chriswarbo wrote:
| A bigger mistake was to _not_ give the N770, N800, etc. phone
| capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and
| thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn 't even
| consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS.
| They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.
| Nursie wrote:
| Good god no.
|
| The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.
|
| Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in
| which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a
| result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-
| the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had
| missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.
|
| Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually
| lead it to be 'good' again, but by then it was too late as
| Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the
| time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone),
| Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous "burning
| platforms" memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone
| exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who
| delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed
| "Windows Phone" onto them, then buying the mobile phone
| division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their
| stillborn mobile platform.
|
| tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name
| recognition and then an MS plant killed it.
|
| Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a
| skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great
| one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved
| it.
| t43562 wrote:
| The happy ending is that MS took the brunt of the disaster.
| :-)
| uecker wrote:
| The N9 could have saved the company in my opinion. It was
| great. I had it for some years before it broke and then
| found the Android I had afterwards to be poor compared to
| it.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Linux was not a mistake on these devices. And I say that as
| the foremost hater of open source and Linux you can find
| around here. In fact, the N9 Linux phone was a huge success
| among everyday people in several countries. Farmers,
| teenagers, everybody got an N9. You couldn't go to any small
| party without at least two people having the N9 phone.
| Everybody loved them. It was in no way a hacker device for
| nerds.
|
| What killed these Linux phones was Microsoft doing a hostile
| takeover of Nokia. The owners of Nokia felt they couldn't
| compete with Apple's iPhone and decided to scuttle their
| business and transfer out as much money as possible to their
| own offshore accounts in the Pacific before the company going
| belly up. I think they could have competed if they weren't
| such cowards.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > You couldn't go to any small party without at least two
| people having the N9 phone. Everybody loved them. It was in
| no way a hacker device for nerds.
|
| I don't think I ever saw N9 or any of the N9XX phones in
| real life.
| uecker wrote:
| The N9 was not sold in any major country. I ordered mine
| from Poland (from the US at that time).
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| I wish the N950 was fully released, there were some produced
| but I don't think it was commercially available. It was the
| true successor to the N900, it would have used the N9 software
| but unlike the N9 it also had a physical keyboard.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
| cvak wrote:
| yeah I scooped n950 on some online marketplace for very cheap
| since it was bricked, fixed it and resold it for profit, but
| what a beauty of a phone, I wish I kept it.
| pmarreck wrote:
| wow dude, a new 950 in the box is a mere $50,000 on eBay
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/154469885901
| aa-jv wrote:
| I was always kind of dissuaded by the chunky, bar of soap
| nature of the Nokia devices. (But then again, I had a few
| OpenPandora to play with as well..)
|
| I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those
| days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like
| device. What a world it was...
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Same here. I miss my N900 dearly. It was one of my most
| expensive items at the time, and I enjoyed this device more
| than the Galaxy S I9000.
|
| It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and
| rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion.
|
| It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could
| blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with
| bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard).
|
| It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so
| you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances.
|
| It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a
| phone.
|
| It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch
| a movie on it without issues.
|
| I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the
| market today, as at the time it was much better than early
| Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty
| in comparison.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate
| Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an
| editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien._
|
| That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone
| beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you
| did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their
| phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won
| consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked
| features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody
| would use.
|
| You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is
| those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their
| Linux phone.
|
| Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially
| viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't
| keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering
| to Linux phone enthusiasts.
|
| Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they
| did.
| fragmede wrote:
| Back then, absolutely. But the long tail of the Internet,
| which is far more pervasive these days compared to back then,
| means that such a device could exist. Which arguably it does,
| with the GPD win max 2, if you install Linux on it.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> means that such a device could exist_
|
| That was never the problem. The problem was how could Nokia
| stay competitive to Apple and Google when their focus was
| selling Linux devices aimed power users.
| uecker wrote:
| I owned the N9. This was a phone which was perfectly good
| also for average users, and it seems it sold very well in
| the few markets where it was actually sold (sadly no
| major markets). But when it came to the market, it was
| already decided that Nokia will kill their own OS
| development in favor of Windows Phone, which then flopped
| spectacularly. A decision which many people called out
| for being stupid before the consequences had fully
| unfolded.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> This was a phone which was perfectly good also for
| average users_
|
| Not good enough to save it from the iPhone onslaught.
|
| People on HN make this mistake to assume that they
| represent the "average user", the same mistake Steve
| Wozniak made. No, the average user wasn't interested in
| all the features of the N9. They much preferred the
| simpler iPhone and the proof is in the pudding.
|
| _> and it seems it sold very well in the few markets
| where it was actually sold_
|
| How do you know it sold well when Nokia never release
| official sales numbers for the N9?
|
| Estimates put the N9 at less than 1 million sales in the
| 23 markets it was sold in. A drop in the ocean compared
| to total iPhone sales of the same timeframe in same 23
| regions which estimate at 50 million total. Face it, the
| N9 was a sales flop no matter how you try to spin this,
| and launching in more markets would not have moved the
| needle significantly to make a dent in the iPhone.
|
| _> (sadly no major markets)_
|
| It launched in 23 markets mate, mostly EMEA and Asia. Not
| NA because even Nokia leadership realized the N9 won't
| stand a chance to compete with the iPhone and Blackberry
| on their home turf.
|
| _> A decision which many people called out for being
| stupid before the consequences had fully unfolded._
|
| Nokia was already dead man walking even before that. Even
| their own employees said so when they got to play with
| the first iPhone in their HQ. The N9 was the band playing
| on the decks on the Titanic.
|
| Blaming Nokia's inevitable failure on Windows Phone is
| historical revisionism. They would have failed either way
| since they lacked the software ecosystem beyond the phone
| that Apple and Google offered their users.
|
| Fanboys praising the N9 as something that would have
| magically saved Nokia even they have done X or Y or Z
| with various Linux spins, are huffing some top end
| copium.
| atmosx wrote:
| > I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate
| Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an
| editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
|
| ... while you were on the movies? That's "Mr Robot" level,
| kudos!
| burnte wrote:
| To me it was also a huge disappointment. I had the N810 and it
| was amazing, I still have it. I wish I could get a new board
| for it. But the N900 was all cheap plastic, no metal like the
| 810, the magnets fell out all the time, the software was janky,
| and several promised features never arrived. It could have been
| awesome, but Nokia had already been distracted in their 5
| device plan that the N900 was part of. We never got the follow
| up and Maemo was abandoned.
| TimByte wrote:
| It wasn't just a phone, it was a little pocket computer that
| assumed you were allowed to solve your own problems
| nico wrote:
| Amazing! One time I did something similar. Went to see a movie
| that was dubbed in Spanish, so I downloaded the movie in
| English and extracted the audio ahead of time, then I played it
| on my phone wearing headphones while watching the movie (had to
| pause/play to adjust timing a few times in the beginning, but
| after that it was great)
| leke wrote:
| I used to work as a software tester in Tampere, Finland with
| Nokia devices. We didn't test those devices in particular, but
| they were a big buzz in our office back in the day. I still have
| my n810, but haven't used it in years after the battery died. I
| remember adding a bunch of unofficial repos and having things
| like apache and python running on it and using it as a web server
| for a while. Eventually the battery was so discharged, even
| having it plugged in to the PSU would not be enough to keep it
| powered. It was such a shame it wouldn't run without the battery.
| I probably would still have use for it.
| sschueller wrote:
| I find the BL-5J battery format and its siblings quite cool
| actually. They fit much better for some projects than a 18650
| etc. I wish there where more standard sized batteries and PCB
| holder for batteries like the BL-5J. While I can get many 18650
| battery holders for PCBs even surface mount I have not seen
| anything more compact.
| 9notorp wrote:
| that was an enjoyable read! loved reading stuff about smartphones
| on forums, especially symbian ones where the die hard fanboys
| absoultely believed that this device was better than the iphones
| and htcs had to offer (including me). too bad maemo / meego died
| off, we may have seen more interesting devices. loved the
| "Contains no LLM-generated content" bit.
| yaky wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Maemo Leste is still around, I just tried it on a PinePhone
| with a keyboard not too long ago.
|
| It's not postmarketOS with a popular DE nor Android, but has a
| terminal, browser, media player, et.
| isopede wrote:
| I have such fond memories of the Nokia N810.
|
| I did my master's thesis on that device. I had a custom
| hypervisor running a guest kernel, virtualized networking, and a
| buildroot userspace. I could SSH into the host N810, then SSH
| into the guest. I even virtualized the framebuffer at some point
| and got the "dancing baby" animation playing from the guest. It
| only ran at a couple frames per second, but it was _amazing_.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The only weird thing about it was that you couldn't charge a
| fully empty N810 with the micro(?) usb charger. It'd charge
| just enough to boot and then crash again, because it couldn't
| wake up far enough to negotiate a higher current with the
| charger.
|
| Had to use a barrel plug to charge it.
|
| Spent a very nervous and sweaty day figuring that out when I
| bought one used with no warranty or returns and it didn't boot
| properly =)
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It sure is a weird thing, but yes, the first mobile devices
| that shipped with USB didn't really know how to charge off
| it.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Which, to be fair to them, usb was never supposed to be a
| power delivery standard (at least not more than the 5 volts
| needed to power a mouse)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I still have one in a drawer from when I worked at Nokia around
| 2009. Great device. I also had the N800 before that.
|
| What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the full
| keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was Linux
| phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-get
| install whatever the hell you wanted. Including compilers,
| developer tools, openssh, and whatever you could think of.
|
| The big difference between the N800 and the N900 was that the
| N800 was more of a tablet form factor (released years before the
| ipad or the iphone were a thing). The N900 was smaller and had a
| proper phone built in. It could connect to mobile networks and
| make phone calls. The N800 was by operator decree basically
| crippled to be wifi only. Operators absolutely hated the notion
| of an open platform like Linux running on devices connected to
| their networks.
|
| The victory Steve Jobs imposed on operators was basically getting
| them to beg on their knees if he would please allow iphones on
| their networks. He completely turned the tables on them. The
| first iphones were exclusive to some networks only and people
| cancelled their subscriptions if they were on the wrong network.
| That's why iMessage is a thing and SMS texts are a thing that is
| no longer generating meaningful amounts of revenue for operators.
| There was no off switch for iMessage. Steve Jobs basically told
| operators to take it or leave it. Likewise MMS was not a thing on
| the first iphone. Nokia mistook that as a fatal omission. A
| missing feature. The truth was that MMS was dead as a doornail
| the moment 3G internet connectivity became a thing. Why have
| operators act as a middle man? Steve Jobs had no patience for any
| of that.
|
| Anyway, Nokia still obeyed the operators and it ended up
| crippling anything with software potential. There were big
| discussions about having Skype on these things. The N800 had
| that. And a webcam. You could make video calls with it. In 2007.
| The N900 did not have Skype. And it was positioned as a developer
| phone. Worse, it had to compete internally with Symbian and the
| Symbian team was in control of the company.
|
| So, it was positioned as a developer phone and the N9 was
| launched (2011) similarly crippled in the same week that they
| shut down the entire team working on the OS. That was around the
| time Symbian lost out to Windows Phone and the beginning of the
| implosion of Nokia's phone division.
|
| The key point here is that Nokia had an Android competitor long
| before Google launched the Nexus. Before they had the Nexus, they
| were dual booting N800s into Android. I flashed mine with a
| development build at some point even. Nokia screwed up the huge
| chance they had there long before the iphone was about to launch.
| The N770 launched late 2005. The iphone wasn't even announced
| until 2007.
|
| Nokia did not understand what it had and crippled the platform
| instead. And then it dropped out of the market completely.
| fsflover wrote:
| > What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the
| full keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was
| Linux phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-
| get install whatever the hell you wanted.
|
| Such phones exist today, too. Sent from my Librem 5.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Indeed, I had a Freerunner back then (the N900 came out
| after, and I couldn't get its predecessors since they weren't
| phones, as the parent points out). It served me well for
| about a decade, and I've now upgraded to a Pinephone.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| > There was no off switch for iMessage
|
| There sorta was and still is, just it uses the same endpoint as
| APN/APS so if any telecom wanted to block it all iphone users
| on their network would lose push notifications too.
|
| I'm glad telecoms got put in their place, used to be a give
| them an inch and they'd take a mile type situation. I dont miss
| their games.
| ezst wrote:
| > Nokia did not understand what it had
|
| Like any other large company, Nokia needed time to adjust its
| strategy, whether it would have happened or not we will never
| know, because Nokia got Trojan horsed by Microsoft killing any
| plausible competition to windows phone, and the whole phone
| division as a result. I still find it incredible that it
| happened just like that.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Pretty impressive. I have one of those (or related) around, might
| give this a go even if Maemo always ran like molasses.
| ezst wrote:
| Did it? I mean, even when you compare it to its contemporary
| devices (it took a while for Android to get close to smooth
| animations and fluid navigation, even without the type of true
| compositing and multitasking the n900 had).
| jandudulski wrote:
| Best phone ever made
| lxglv wrote:
| That's not a Necromancy, that's rather a Dr. Frankenstein's
| creature.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills
| and knowledge required to pull this off?
|
| I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either.
| I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and
| written software for four years, I take an interest in anything
| techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population
| genomics and molecular genetics without assistance.
|
| I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic
| to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery?
| How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in
| order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you
| even tell if an internal partition is corrupted?
|
| This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable,
| but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention
| to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to
| mastery.
| Sammi wrote:
| I don't have a degree in low voltage electrical engineering,
| but haven worked close to people who are this does all look
| like grunt work in that field. So maybe get a bachelor in low
| voltage electrical engineering? It's all as much
| digital/computational as it is actually physical these days.
| Lots of educated electrical engineers end up as software devs,
| often doing the low level coding. Bootloaders, firmware, and
| drivers are stuff you have to figure out if you want to get
| modern electrical hardware to do anything.
| Sammi wrote:
| * sorry, I accidentally a word
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Can't claim to know the specifics, but there's some supporting
| links for both the battery and bootloader stuff in the article.
| The supercapacitor (can be a regular cap too, but would be
| physically much larger) is for buffering the power supply to
| prevent the device from shutting off if there's a momentary
| draw that causes the voltage to drop.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| I appreciate what you're saying here, but what I'm asking
| about isn't the set of solutions to the problems described in
| the article. What I'm interested in is the underlying mental
| model of how this kind of device works.
| throw_me_uwu wrote:
| Just play with electronics,
| Arduino/Raspberry/ESP32-compatible stuff is cheap and
| available. Lots of information about it. A phone is not
| that much different from a microcontroller board on a
| battery.
| lambdas wrote:
| You can pick it up passively over time, and with your skills,
| if you were to actively engage then I suspect pick up the
| necessary very quickly, and the rest comes from experience.
|
| I picked up Linux at 13, fortuitously just in time for the
| release of the Nokia 770 (later getting, and still owning the
| N900 too).
|
| At that time, getting real dirty with the kernel, hardware,
| cross compiling etc was necessary, so 1) there were more
| resources 2) it was seen as mundane, busy work rather than
| mystical and difficult.
|
| If I were to say how to learn the same things today, I'd
| probably say Gentoo is ideal - it's insanely flexible in
| tinkering, has good resources on compiling the kernel and
| packages, and I'm a fan of crossdev for cross compiling.
|
| Getting real dirty with hardware and electronics, the obvious
| answer would be one of the Raspberry Pi lineup, but if you're
| very tenacious, patient and a touch unhinged, then I would
| actually say now's the time to get in on RISC-V.
|
| It's still early days, so there's lots of resources that have
| very thin abstractions between hardware <-> tooling <-> code.
| Devices are cheap and exciting. You'll be on the same footing
| as most other people so you won't feel like a dunce.
|
| The cons are that a lot of RISC-V devices get shipped out with
| very little documentation (and sometimes only in Chinese),
| binary blobs making mainstream kernels difficult, and you're
| learning at the same time, so you might feel you're ice skating
| uphill.
|
| Wrt to the bootloader and partition corruption; towards the
| twilight years of the life of the N900, when it became clear
| N900 had been abandoned and the N950 was still only available
| to select few, a bunch of smart people on the Maemo forums
| started reversing and writing open drivers (uboot bootloader,
| wifi, camera iirc), so they became pretty documented.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Honestly, It is just a matter of starting somewhere. Anywhere.
| All these hobbies are a huge rabbit hole that seem to converge.
|
| I have friends who started with porting Sailfish OS to their
| old Android phone and now they are designing their own PCBs for
| their home automation system. They custom built their own RC
| cars, 3D printed their own ergonomic keyboards, designed their
| holiday decorative lights etc..
|
| I have seen a lot of people in my local FPV Drone Racing
| community, who started with building their own custom drone and
| then moved on to 3D printing their modifications, tweaking
| their firmware, building their custom lithium battery packs,
| designing their ergonomic keyboards, and now fiddling with
| their home automation software/hardware.
|
| Also installing Arch Linux onto some random piece of hardware,
| regularly following Hackaday like blogs seems to help.. lol.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't think true mastery exists in a continuously-evolving
| field like tech, it's all people just figuring things out, and
| accumulating enough knowledge/experience means the things you
| build no longer blow up and _mostly_ do what you want them to (
| "mostly" being load-bearing here - even the big boys publish
| errata notices for their chips because even _they_ miss things
| sometimes).
| yaky wrote:
| I read about lithium-ion and LiFePO batteries on Adafruit a few
| years ago, and saw similar projects elsewhere. The bootloader
| stuff is on Maemo wiki, along with tools to flash the device
| (which is also a bit of dark magic arts to me).
|
| TBH, I didn't / don't exactly have a path. I started with
| Raspberry Pi (and Linux for the second time) 10+ years ago,
| which led me to Arduino, which led me to low-voltage
| electronics in general. At the same time, I had an unreasonable
| dislike of google, which led me to flashing LineageOS on a test
| phone, which then became my main phone, which eventually led to
| PinePhone, which didn't work out, but was fun.
| TimByte wrote:
| A lot of this looks like black magic from the outside because
| the learning path is mostly invisible
| niemandhier wrote:
| There is so much love for the n900 and the n950.
|
| Yet still there is not true successor, although I would expect
| that producing things like this became cheaper in the recent
| years.
| ezst wrote:
| Same HN niche that wants smaller iPhones, just not commercially
| viable they say.
| usagisushi wrote:
| N810, N900, N9 owner here.
|
| Good read. I did the exact same modification to my N900; it was
| my internet router for several years. In those days, a mobile
| carrier in my country offered a relatively cheap data plan for
| dumb phones: unlimited data, but restricted internet connectivity
| with a WAP proxy. Fortunately, thanks to curl and busybox utils,
| I figured out that the proxy allowed CONNECT requests, and a tiny
| C program on my N900 was able to transparently tunnel all TCP
| connections to the internet.
|
| BTW, my N900 had another mod: it featured a Type-A female port :)
| augustl wrote:
| I was a huge N9 fanboy. Wish I didn't sell mine, and that
| Microsoft didn't kill it :)
| BirAdam wrote:
| I wanted an N900 so bad when it came out. A buddy of mine had
| one, but I had recently purchased a new iPhone. I couldn't
| justify switching at that point.
| classified wrote:
| A portable Linux computer that can also act as a phone and has
| Cyrillic letters on the keyboard? Fucking awesome.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Man I really wanted the N900 so badly, my first real smartphone.
| But I decided to skip N900, because I was sure that the N901 (or
| whatever) was going to be insane good and I wanted to not spend
| the money yet.
|
| Sadly, that day never came ...
| fenykep wrote:
| On the software side there is an Argentinian (I believe) artist
| who actively uses blender on Nokia N95s, you can even connect a
| projector to it. Absolutely blew my mind when I saw it.
|
| https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-...
| TimByte wrote:
| Probably not practical. Definitely not advisable. But deeply
| satisfying to read.
| yaky wrote:
| To quote someone from Hackaday:
|
| > We don't ask "why?", we ask "why not?"
| ge96 wrote:
| Seeing htop running reminds me of Pine64 PPP ahhh fun to mess
| around with but eventually I sold em
| geoffeg wrote:
| My N900 was one of my favorite computing devices that I've owned.
| The keyboard was good enough for my needs, I could open a
| terminal quickly, battery life was fine. If someone came out with
| a modern version that had a slide out keyboard and similar size,
| maybe running a raspberry-pi level CPU, I'd buy it in a
| heartbeat.
| ZebusJesus wrote:
| The best phone I have ever owned! Running linux you could do so
| much including hacking wifi. The keyboard was great and the pop
| out camera for video calls was fun to use.
| silveira wrote:
| Oh, I wish I could do something like that for my Nokia N800.
| psyclobe wrote:
| Oh I had that phone I recall trying very hard to browse to the
| Landon website while driving just to play some music heh.
|
| I recall having to spin with my finger in a spiral to zoom in.
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