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The answers won't be complete without mentioning the Maemo/Meego series of phones, including the Nokia N900 and N9. The N900 keeps its appeal today because it'

The answers won't be complete without mentioning the Maemo/Meego series of phones, including the Nokia N900 and N9. The N900 keeps its appeal today because it's fully programmable (even if toolchains are woefully outdated), and the community is still (after 10 years!) vibrant. It's also small, offers a hardware keyboard, has decent battery life, and has the usual gimmicks expected from a smart phone: camera, GPS, GUI package manager, etc.

mpol 6y ago
Just curious, but if you enjoy a Nokia N900, would you not consider the Cosmo Communicator or the Fxtec a good follow-up? It has modern hardware, still a good hardware keyboard. Together with the more updated Sailfish OS you get something much newer and faster. I can imagine criticism about Jolla not having everything open sourced, but what I remember it was the same situation with Nokia for the N900 and N9. Also, in some respects the UI of Sailfish is somewhat different from Maemo/Meego, not everybody will like that.
- numpad0 6y ago
  Is the keyboard really good? I’ve tried one of Cosmo, Gemini, or Fxtec in person, can’t remember which, and utterly disappointed upon first touch. It looked like a proper laptop but keys tilted on roll and pitch axes like a TV remote. Good hardware keyboard seems to need a lot of iteration and investments to do so.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> The N900 keeps its appeal today because it's fully programmable. While some of the userspace software has still been developed in the years since Nokia’s abandonment of the phone, the N900's kernel is stuck at an ancient version riddled with security issues, and also the SSL/TLS libraries are outdated. For some years I still used my N900 in airplane mode to listen to music because it had decent sound output on its headphone jack and ran MPD, but I would not recommend connecting an N900 to the internet in this day and age.

mpol 6y ago

Just curious, but if you enjoy a Nokia N900, would you not consider the Cosmo Communicator or the Fxtec a good follow-up? It has modern hardware, still a good hardware keyboard. Together with the more updated Sailfish OS you get something much newer and faster. I can imagine criticism about Jolla not having everything open sourced, but what I remember it was the same situation with Nokia for the N900 and N9. Also, in some respects the UI of Sailfish is somewhat different from Maemo/Meego, not everybody will like that.

numpad0 6y ago
Is the keyboard really good? I’ve tried one of Cosmo, Gemini, or Fxtec in person, can’t remember which, and utterly disappointed upon first touch. It looked like a proper laptop but keys tilted on roll and pitch axes like a TV remote. Good hardware keyboard seems to need a lot of iteration and investments to do so.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> The N900 keeps its appeal today because it's fully programmable. While some of the userspace software has still been developed in the years since Nokia’s abandonment of the phone, the N900's kernel is stuck at an ancient version riddled with security issues, and also the SSL/TLS libraries are outdated. For some years I still used my N900 in airplane mode to listen to music because it had decent sound output on its headphone jack and ran MPD, but I would not recommend connecting an N900 to the internet in this day and age.