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I used to have that. It was my Nokia n900. I was able to pull up live thumbnail previews of all apps running in the background, and this included live simultane
by lphnull 10y ago
I used to have that. It was my Nokia n900. I was able to pull up live thumbnail previews of all apps running in the background, and this included live simultaneous previews of: youtube videos in a web browser, games, and Debian, without lag. Try doing that on today's technology. It had a wonderfully acurate resistive touch screen that was pressure senstive that was really good for drawing and coloring! The camera would start up immediately as soon as I opened the shutter, even while the screen is off and in a sleep state. My modern android device takes so much longer to even get the shutter ready.
I loved always having access to a physical keyboard and an actual root linux shell out of the box without any hacking. I loved that my n900 behaved more like a computer and less like "mobile" device.
Too bad Nokia decided to end support for the n900. Most of its developers and lots of its users abandoned ship, and now I only use it as a camera because the n900 is stuck in 2009, and the web in 2016 is so bloated and heavy that nothing- not even the web browser or the unupdated apps- are usable now.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI still want an N900 now. The web be damned: it could still browse HN. Nowadays, the next best thing is the Pyra, but that still has't been released. By the way, have you seen the neo900 project? It sounds like you would be interested, although it is also incomplete.
- lphnull 10y agoI spent $300+ (way too much!) for my n900 and I still think it was worth it. It was my replacement for my tmobile g1 phone. The n900 is everything that I thought the g1 was going to be, but wasn't. In a way, it was my fault for blindly creating my own hype over a first generation product I knew nothing about. The g1 turned out to be my bad and disappointing foray into smart phones. Also, yes I have heard of the neo900 project, but am sad that the project is so far from its goals. There will never be enough n900 users to meet a crowdfund. :(
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI wouldn't be so sure. There are a lot of N900 users and fans. Another interesting project which might fill my desire for a true mobile computer (if only I could afford it) is the Pyra, the more powerful successor to the Pandora. But at $~500-$~600, it may not be worth it, and it still hasn't actually released yet (although the company did make the Pandora, so they have a history of Getting Stuff Done). If you're going on the cheap, you can always hack together a Raspberry Pi and a tiny screen, keyboard, and battery into something semi-workable, and use a phone for the rest.
- morganvachon 10y ago> If you're going on the cheap, you can always hack together a Raspberry Pi and a tiny screen, keyboard, and battery into something semi-workable, and use a phone for the rest. You can get a GSM board from Adafruit fairly cheaply, which would give you 3G data and voice/SMS on a Pi. You'd have to do your own wiring, but if you're building something like this that wouldn't be a problem. Throw a Ting SIM in there (or your other favorite carrier) and you're good to go. Basically a mobile phone version of Bunnie's Novena laptop, though not quite as open source (at least not until Broadcom finishes opening up the RPi's processor).
- ZenoArrow 10y agoI think the Pyra even has an (optional?) modem module you could potentially make calls with (using a Bluetooth headset rather than sidetalking-style ;-)): https://www.pyra-handheld.com/wiki/index.php?title=Modem https://www.pyra-handheld.com/wiki/index.php?title=Modem
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYeah, but it costs 100 euros extra.
- nextos 10y agoPyras are really really close to being released. I think max 10-12 weeks.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoreally? Nice. I really want one, but sadly cannot afford it right now. Not at that price. Let's hope they keep selling them.
- benmcnelly 10y agoYou are not alone, I have two good friends that still have theirs too, and nothing will ever be good enough for them again. That phone spoiled them, and is the direction they wish phones went. Alas, they have gone the way of the masses instead, but you know if someone like a OnePlus came out with a modern powered phone, with a big battery (phone size doesn't matter to us), a physical keyboard, dual sim, expandable memory and an open source OS, there would be DOZENS of us that would snap it up. Dozens!
- imjustsaying 10y agoMaddox would enjoy a reboot, too. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
- bitJericho 10y agoThe most objective comparison of two cellphones ever made.
- digi_owl 10y agoHuh, i completely missed that Nokia made a Symbian variant of their split keyboard design. I recall a relative of mine owned one of the featurephone models. Things like this is what makes me feel that the mobile market came to a screeching halt somewhere around 2007, and has barely been picking up speed since.
- cure 10y agoOwwww, the E70! I loved that phone. Still have mine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Gruselbauer 10y agoI loved Nokia's smartphones so much. E70, E61, N900... Those were the pinnacles of smartphoning for me. Their successors somehow manage to fall short in vital aspects every single time, it's beyond frustrating.
- amyjess 10y agoI clung to my N900 for so long. I got it at launch in fall 2009, and I used it as my daily driver until early 2014, when I finally buckled and got a Nexus 5. By that point, my N900 was barely usable, but I was really dragging my feet on a replacement because I knew that any other OS would be a step backwards.
- lphnull 10y agoThat's exactly what I got mine, and exactly when I retired mine because I didn't want it to flat out stop working. The USB port died and the SD card never worked to begin with. Once the circuitry for the wifi becomes inoperational (like what happened with my tmobile g1), then I consider the phone officially dead...
- amyjess 10y agoYep, my USB port died too. I ended up getting an external charger and a handful of spare batteries. Did that for about a year or two before I got my Nexus 5. At least buying new batteries gave me back my battery life that had degraded to almost nothing over the years. On top of that, over the years, the kickstand broke, the screen got scratched badly, my belt clip broke in multiple places, the SIM slot became really finicky, and even the plastic around the keyboard was starting to come out. And a lot of the problem was performance: a 600 MHz OMAP3 was great in 2009, but by 2014 it was just too slow to handle modern websites, and the browser based on Firefox 3.5 (maybe 3.6?) couldn't even handle some newer websites. And to be honest, the RAM was low even for its time... only 256 MB, operated as a unionfs with the rootfs, plus some of the (very, very slow) eMMC was formatted as swap. Over time, most apps stopped working: I remember using Facebrick to access Facebook for a while, and it was nice, but eventually the author stopped updating it, and Facebook changed their API, so no more Facebrick. It got to the point where I'd only use the browser, terminal, camera, and dialer, because that's all that was useful. About a year after getting my Nexus 5, I booted up my N900 to get some photos off it, and I found I had difficulty emailing them to myself because Gmail had changed their API and flagged my N900's connection attempts because they used the old API that was deprecated for security reasons. None of the emails went through, and when I got back to my desktop, Google took me to a page telling me it thought my account had been compromised.
- photonwins 10y agoThe best mobile computer I have ever used, I kicked myself when I dropped it on the floor and the screen broke. I ordered a compatible screen from ebay and changed it myself. It was so much fun opening up a terminal and ssh'ing into my workstation. Then Nokia had to go out of the way to ruin it for me.
- girvo 10y agoI adored my Nokia N9 for similar reasons! The single best phone I've ever owned.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoWhy adored? Why not adore? I still have my N9 and I use it every day.
- grownseed 10y agoBoy do I miss the N900... Mine is sitting on my desk like a museum piece gathering dust, and it makes me sad that no modern phone has come remotely close to it. I used it as my main phone when travelling for years and it worked everywhere I needed it to when other phones wouldn't. I'd use it for getting unwacoughted access to WiFi when I was in a tough spot. I'd manage my servers with it. I'd use it to emit music through the radio on car trips and such (why is this no longer a thing?). I could even push my own programs on it without having to make a sacrifice to the phone gods. I'd also kill for a keyboard like that again. But no, instead you have to get a hobbyist device or get one of the many shiny slabs running (poorly) one of three (and I mean, really, two) ecosystems.
- pre 10y agoOh, man, I forgot it had that FM-Transmitter. That was so cool. So many of us miss that phone.
- 4goodapp 10y agoWell, at least it work well with HN. http://i.imgur.com/wg9r4DM.png http://i.imgur.com/wg9r4DM.png :)
- lphnull 10y agoyou're giving me nostalgia. I always dreamed that my n900 was going to be my futuristic bitcoin phone. I suspect that people started abandoning the n900 right around the time that our dreams were crushed in the great bitcoin crash of not so long ago.
- jcoffland 10y agoGoogle made a huge mistake choosing to base Android on Java, IMHO. I know they did it because they felt it would be easier to get developers on board but it's the main reason Android is slow and memory hungry. OSes like Plasma prove that compiling binaries for ARM processors is not a big problem and that compiled code runs much faster. Java byte code may have the potential to run close to native speed but in practice it carries with it a lot of bloat.
- biafra 10y agoApparently you have no idea how Android works. There is no Java byte code running on Android devices. It doesn't even reach the device. Google just used the Java language and APIs. But never it's byte code or VM.
- danudey 10y agoThe code is written in Java, but a technical note: it's actually compiled to bytecode for the Dalvik runtime (and later, the Android runtime). Your points are still relevant, don't get me wrong, but the system isn't running Java bytecode specifically.
- pjmlp 10y agoAnd of course Android Rutime does AOT compilation to native code and with Android 7 a tiered compilation Assembly/JIT/AOT with PGO.
- pjmlp 10y agoYou obviously aren't aware that since Android 5 there isn't any bytecode being interpreted. Android is 100% native code since that version. Even the changes in Android 7, although they use an intepreter written in Assembly, the code is JITed with profile information, both are cached and it gets ultimately fully compiled to native code when the device is charging. Also in case you didn't notice, Apple is pushing for LLVM bitcode for their newer OS versions. There is even a BOF on this weeek's LLVM meeting about how to make LLVM IR fully hardware neutral.
- 10y ago
- dingo_bat 10y agoI think the n900 was a great device but you have a case of rose tinted nostalgia. Today's android phones can do everything you described and more and better. For example, my phone can go from deep sleep to perfectly focused photo snapped in half a second. I'll give you the keyboard though. Nothing beats a full keyboard.
- shakna 10y agoWhat's the difference in the hardware between your phone and the n900 though? How much extra power do we have to cram into the device just to achieve the same performance?
- cheiVia0 10y agoYou are not alone: https://neo900.org/ https://neo900.org/