15 ms·

The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

241 points by tate 6y ago

sleepysysadmin 6y ago
The N900 was fantastic. The phone was to be a leader until Stephen Elop. Elop was a Microsoft employee who never stopped being a microsoft employee. As fake ceo of nokia he convinced the board to switch to microsoft OS and drop their success. Nokia did that and then when Nokia sales plummetted to disasterous level he proposed selling that division to Microsoft at quite the discount. Afterall who wants to buy a failing division. 11,000 employees laid off because of Elop's incompetence. What the board should have done was fire Elop very publicly and move right back to the Linux ecosystem. They had a leg up to basically be what Pinephone, chinaphones, and so many other phones are trying to be.
Black101 6y ago
I wish I could own a phone like this today. Too bad companies are so cheap that they can only produce keyboardless phones with widescreens...
- opan 6y ago
  There is the PinePhone, and a keyboard attachment is actively being worked on. https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/ https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/ > PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well – but we’re still waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this month There are pictures as well.
gt565k 6y ago
I miss good quality phones with replaceable batteries and sd card slots.
z3t4 6y ago
Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  I wonder why Nokia didn't go to Android route. It's like it still want to have a platform where it is seen as king and not as another commodity player. Or maybe Nokia was just having a pet peeve with Google.
  - mavhc 6y ago
    Nokia was a hardware company, they didn't value software. They'd design a phone, and then pick an OS to run on it at the last minute.
indymike 6y ago
If you go back a little bit, there are a few devices that really were forks in the road for the industry. Probably the biggest, most important: * Commodore Amiga * Psion PDAs * Nokia N900 * Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone) All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dustbin because of business issues.
- krtkush 6y ago
  I would add Nokia N9 too.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  The Amiga is a little weird, I think it had to many custom chips to be successful. The PC succeeded because of the clones. Cloning the Amiga would be insanely hard, because only Commodore had access to chips required to make the Amiga run.
dkarl 6y ago
I owned one of the Nokia tablets, maybe the N770. I carried it everywhere with me for months, until I had to admit I just didn't want to use it. When something came up that required me to access my email or use the web, rather than pull out the Nokia, I would wait and do it at home if at all possible. (I didn't yet carry a laptop everywhere.) It's interesting now to think I had this with me 24/7 for months and it didn't change my life at all. Same with the Palm V I owned before it. All the exciting ideas were there in the zeitgeist (portable general purpose computer in my pocket! ubiquitous instant access to information!) but the technology couldn't realize them yet.
wazoox 6y ago
Ah yeah. There was a bug in the WiFi applet that prevented it to use 64 characters WPA2 passwords; only 63 could be entered in the field. Source: my company's WiFi was 64 characters, and the one employee with an N900 couldn't connect :)
pabs3 6y ago
I hear that the N900 is the best supported mobile device in mainline Linux, except perhaps for the PowerVR GPU, although there are rumours ImgTec are writing an open source driver for Linux & Mesa for PowerVR.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  I've heard those rumors for about 10 years already though :)
alex_duf 6y ago
The N9 was the first phone I know to be able to switch apps or close apps using the swipe movement. It was really hard moving to android as I missed the swiping to navigate the OS. Now Apple is using swiping and all the cool kids think it's cool again. But like any good hipster I can tell you I was doing it before it was cool.
- dntrkv 6y ago
  I think the Palm WebOS was really ahead of it's time with how they handled multiple apps as "cards." The iOS UI is basically a clone of their approach. The Palm Pre brought some really interesting concepts to smartphones at the time.
speeder 6y ago
Nokia behaviour in Brazil infuriates me. 1. The burning platform thingy happened when Nokia was absolutely dominating Brazillian smartphone market, people had even ported Counter-Strike to Symbian! Then suddenly it was dead, and didn't even get replaced by iPhone as the memo predicted, instead it got replaced by chinese no-name phones (until the government got annoyed and banned them outright... if you use a imported phone, cell towers can kick it out of the network) 2. Nokia abandoned all their business here for some years. 3. Nokia is now back, but all they do is half-hearteadly sell some crappy androids, they KaiOS market is booming in India, and has much potential in Brazil, but they refuse to sell KaiOS phones here, and you can't import them (because they get kicked out of the network by the cell towers), meanwhile local companies are making crappy KaiOS phones and doing reasonably well.
nfriedly 6y ago
+1 for the GPD call out! I have a GPD Win Max, and while I mostly use it for playing games, I have done some programing and networking work on it. Although I feel like the GPD MicroPC might be of more interest to the type of person who would have gone for a N900. It's a bit smaller than the Pocket 2 that they linked to, while at the same time having a better port selection - https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc
twobitshifter 6y ago
I remember trying to get the successor N9 which was DOA due to the announcement of the Microsoft deal. Nokia had their platform to go up against Android and Apple, but it was simply too late. I think the N9 compares favorably against both iPhones and Android at the time, and Nokia was ahead in terms of cameras.
danans 6y ago
I had an N810 (predecessor to the N900), and it was very cool - at the time, it really felt like "the future". However, I must admit that I liked it for what it was -a toy - and not for what it could actually do in a productive sense. At the end of the day, it wasn't possible to perform any sustained productive activity on it. In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an inverse relationship between the portability and the productivity of a computing device. This is particularly true for types work that involves mentally integrating and generating large (for the human mind) amounts of information like code - but also for reviewing documents, managing financial accounts (interacting with a large spreadsheet on a phone is a nightmare). It's why at the end of the day, most engineers and architects (whether in software or real engineers in the physical realm), get most of their work done in front of large screens with full size keyboards (or at least large laptops). This isn't to say that there aren't niche use cases or circumstances where a Linux computer in your pocket isn't extremely useful - the example always rolled out being "remote administration" of a server - but even these tend to be exceptions. It's nearly always better to accomplish remote administration tasks from a laptop.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  I hate to keep evangelizing about the N900, but I didn't bring my laptop on business trips to conferences (i.e. non-coding business trips.) The N900 was enough for me to ssh work I had to do at the office, and enough for me for everything else. My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|" wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a screen touch to get to.
  - danans 6y ago
    I fully believe and acknowledge that for some very niche use cases, this might work. In particular, the specific use case of "ssh to a server and run a few commands". But even in that example, if the output of the command is many pages of error or logging output that you need to diagnose, the tiny screen and keyboard are going to become ineffective very quickly. Even while at a conference and doing conference-y things like modifying, giving, or reviewing presentations, a bigger screen and keyboard are pretty indispensable.
CharleFKane 6y ago
I got in a little late: some of my friends bought N770s early on, but I didn't get in until the N800. I own (still) an N800 and an N810. Though I haven't picked up either in a while, I thought they were nifty devices at the time, and should pick them back up again. I still think they have a lot going for them. (The N800 was actually the first mobile navigation system I ever used, with an external Bluetooth GPS and software based on OpenStreetMaps.) I was unable to find an N900 anywhere when it was new. I was met with pretty much blank stares. Eventually, an online vendor got some refurbished N900s in stock at a good price. I ordered one, got it, plugged it in overnight to charge... ...and in the morning, it was totally dead. I emailed the vendor and asked for an exchange because, you know, one bad one out of the bunch, they were refurbs anyway, no problem. The vendor wrote back and told me that they had received a batch of 28 of them. ALL the ones they got had some sort of problem that resulted in a return, they would not be getting any more of them, and if I sent it back they'd give me a refund. Thus ended my N900 experiment.
SeanLuke 6y ago
I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed. Because the interface was really terrible. It was so bad I even made an article about it here: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in many respects of course, but its interface was elegant, consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful. I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking that you didn't need one. And boy did it show. Also, terrible battery life.
SotirisMak 6y ago
After 10 years and still reading the same, as we stuck in the past. The bad Symbian, if Elop was a Trojan horse or was just a scapegoat, a deflection. What strikes me is the love and admiration for a product that proudly can claim that was from the very start. Privileged to be part of that diverse "mutant" team made by Ari, Ansi, Raouf and Yannick. Ideologically satisfied that we supported open-source projects and financed their development. At the same time, Im also curious why no one talks if a security framework was designed to protect the privacy, of billions, of consumers. Or if the EU was ready to offer digital protection by investing in companies and the relevant ecosystem. Bottom line, the issue was never simple, was very complex and multidimensional, perhaps geopolitical at the core. Take for example the Huawei case, Finland is too important to the west to be embarrassed in the same way. So complex environment to explain that an Elop needed to clear the mess, take the blame and move on. For me the outcome had positive effects, Finland became a startup nation. All Meego employees evolved their careers in global companies. I dare to claim that Microsoft adapting Linux was caused by the infusion of Meego people through the acquisition. So be happy that you were part of a profound change, as fans or contributors. The key question now that I have for you. What is the next step beyond Meego, Jolla? How Gnu/Linux can make a comeback into mass-market commercial products? How a 150-year-old company such as Nokia can benefit from that? How consumers can benefit from Linux products? What is the evolution of Linux in relation to AI? How the related communities and fans can be united to create new business models and services? Bottom line, instead of being nostalgic, let’s use our passion to create something new. Please accept my intellectual challenge and engage by offering answers. Surely, being nostalgic is making me depressed when thinking about the lost opportunities. Im here and available for something new and big. So please inspire me with new ideas!
wartron 6y ago
Before this was a "feature phone" the Nokia 9000, i loved it. When this was out I was using the OG Motorola Droid. I wanted one of these but they were not available on my carrier so I stayed on the Droid line. The hot-dog slide keyboard was amazing. I had full terminal control from these. Nowadays I actually still rock a 2017 iphone SE; dimensions wise I don't want anything bigger in width or height, but i would gladly add some thickness to get a full tactile keyboard again.
- bzzzt 6y ago
  I used an N900 for a few years (got one with the early adopter discount when it was released). While the keyboard was miles ahead of all the on-screen stuff at the time I don't think I want to go back to that keyboard from a current decent touch-screen phone. The keys were a bit too small for fast typing...
  - u801e 6y ago
    I wonder how it compared to the keyboard on the N97. Though it was a symbian based phone, the putty client allowed you to connect to a server and attach to a screen or tmux session, which worked okay with that keyboard and a few on-screen buttons.
  - seba_dos1 6y ago
    The key size is alright, I'm able to type on it much faster than on a touchscreen - provided that I don't need to use anything else than regular letters. The most painful thing on that keyboard is lack of 4th row of keys.
finchisko 6y ago
Still have this little linux phone. It missed compass hw, so map experience was not great and also resistive display was inferior to iPhone, but still loved it. It's bad Nokia didn't manage it create viable platform, but rather switched to Windows phones and also died there with broken teeth.
- u801e 6y ago
  They had released the N9 and there was a developer only N950. I'm still using my N9 even today though the lock mechanism on the SIM holder no longer works.
  - gymnodemi 6y ago
    Wow, I had to abandon my N9 after all of my fixes including buying a new SIM holder failed. I still have my N9 and my N900. I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer. It easily beat all of the Android phones at that time. I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired and the SIM holder wasn't horked.
    - u801e 6y ago
      > I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer I think we have Stephan Elop to thank for that. I never really understood why Nokia didn't just focus on the market outside the US. Had they continued producing phones like the N9, I'm sure they could have retained a lot of market share in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. > I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired I'm not sure whether all of the CAs had expired, but I wonder if it would be possible to get an updated package with up to date CAs. The main issue I have is that it can't negotiate an agreed upon cipher when trying to establish a TLS connection. I'm still able to use the Firefox browser to browse a number of websites like Facebook and Reddit. Hacker news still works with the built-in browser. Facebook sometimes works with the default browser and the old subdomain reddit website will lock up the default browser in my experience (the current reddit website layout is a no-go).
    - kbr2000 6y ago
scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990-2020. Apparently when the iPhone was announced the whole company was in deep shock and disarray. They were planning on the first touchscreen phones hitting the market around 2010-2015, and here was a company promising to deliver one by 2008.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 6y ago
  Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd dislocated the screen. Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before Samsung arrived.
  - gambler 6y ago
    >Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I loved the Nokia N900's design, that hardware keyboard that made it so easy to do remote system administration over SSH, or keep doing everything that I want to do in Emacs just like on my laptop or desktop computers. Also like all Nokia phones of the time, it was nearly indestructible and could easily survive drops that would destroy a modern smartphone’s screen or casing. However, in retrospect not all was rosy. Advocates of Linux phones today would prefer to avoid binary blobs that make upgrades impossible (the N900 is forever stuck on kernel 2.6) and a cellular modem connected directly to main memory.
- ggus 6y ago
  The design has been re-proposed a few times, notably the F(x)tec PRO¹ looks really similar and cool. https://www.fxtec.com/pro1 https://www.fxtec.com/pro1
- u801e 6y ago
  I wish I had the opportunity to use the N900. I still have a partially working N9 (the SIM holder lock is broken meaning I have to hold the SIM in to use it for calls). I still browse and post on HN using it on occasion.
  - tominated 6y ago
    I still have my N9 lying around somewhere - had to get the sim tray replaced two or three times but otherwise I loved it. How did you update the security certificates? I tried to boot mine up a while back but it was basically unusable on the web because of HTTPS.
    - u801e 6y ago
      I haven't updated the security certificates so far, bit I don't think that most of the TLS connection issues are due to expired CA certificates in the certificate bundle. I believe it's because it can't negotiate a mutually agreed upon cipher. It still works with a few websites like this one. In fact, I'm using my N9 to post this comment :-).
  - 6y ago
gtk40 6y ago
I had a Nokia N800 "Internet Tablet" and loved that device. Android was a huge downgrade compared to what you could do with that in every way except interface, and the interface wasn't too bad.
- dbish 6y ago
  Same. In college I would show it off while working at the IT desk by sshing into the computer lab machines and checking on running programs/homework/etc. Used a bluetooth keyboard for the full "hacker-on-the-go" experience
- serf 6y ago
  I had an N800 and and N900 afterwards. I used the N800 until the battery eventually failed. It was amazingly liberating, as a 'computer person', to have a truly hand-held computer; all my friends and family thought it was a stupid toy with a hard-to-understand interface -- but they liked drawing on it.
  - jbj 6y ago
    I had an N800 and found it so amazing, 2 sd card slots, pop out camera that could rotate, and a useful kickstand. I recently found the Planet Computers devices and tried their first version out, it is conceptually a bit similar to the fxtec mentioned in the blog post.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  I had the older 770, and loved it with all its limitations. I recall downloading Google maps images of a desired area trough a 3rd party tool that would also stitch them together, then and using them on the 770 with an external GPS receiver to have sort of a live map while driving. And the LCARS Star Trek styled screen gave a nice touch too. Nokia was developing great products back then, then one day Microsoft came and ended it all.
  - Tor3 6y ago
    Did the same with my N800 while driving in South Africa. The downloaded satellite maps showed the roads that were actually there, unlike those on the maps.. and that was very important, as it turned out. Very glad we had that N800. (I had the N800 first, and got the N900 when it came out)
jart 6y ago
My favorite device from that era was the HP Jornada since that with linux and an orinoco card felt like something straight out of the hacking movies. https://youtu.be/1s-tekLn7Nc https://youtu.be/1s-tekLn7Nc
- egfx 6y ago
  Interesting I didn’t know about this device. I had the HP Pre3. Looking at this is like watching the evolution of dinosaurs to mammals in a way.
wmf 6y ago
Thom makes a really insightful point: "people who want a true Linux computer in their pocket". I wanted a more open iPhone and I hated the N900 because it was terrible as a smartphone. Between the stylus, unconstrained multitasking, desktop Firefox, and Flash it's like they were trying to prove Steve Jobs right. The G2 was so much better because it had an actual phone OS.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  What's wrong with unconstrained multitasking? I thought it worked well on the N900. I also think it works well on Android.
  - bestouff 6y ago
    On Android it's very constrained. Background apps are quickly killed to save battery, whereas on my N900 any running app which wouldn't stop by itself would drain it in a few minutes.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Apps can't even reliably sync data on Android without using a special Google-hosted remote service that pings your phone when there is an update. Music apps have to register specially so they don't get killed in the background.
    - tom_mellior 6y ago
      Android is constrained in that sense, I agree. I thought the OP meant constrained like iPhones of the period were: No pretense of multitasking, every task switch being "close an app, open another one".
- regularfry 6y ago
  I liked the stylus. More precise than a fingertip, which it wanted to be on a screen that small. Although you could use a fingernail too, in a pinch. People pointed at the resistive screen as evidence it wasn't as good as an iPhone, but the thing is that it was a very, very good resistive screen. High resolution, accurate, and you didn't need to mash it to get it to register.
windsurfer 6y ago
I have both an N900 and a Pro1 and it's everything I wanted in a phone/device. I'm using self-compiled LineageOS on it right now and it is as "Linux-y" as I need and want, complete with a usable terminal and SSH apps. I'm not sure why you haven't been able to get a review unit of the new Pro1-x model, but I'll get in contact with someone at f(x)tec for you.
- skykooler 6y ago
  One thing from the N900 that I really miss on the Pro1 is the ability to multi-boot different operating systems. I think at one point I had five OS's running on my N900, mostly off of various microSD cards - Maemo, Android, Meego, SHR and Plasma Mobile. For the Pro1 I'd settle for being able to dual-boot Sailfish and LineageOS, but as it is now you need to pick one or the other.
  - windsurfer 6y ago
    Many people in the community are getting around this limitation by running virtual machines of the various operating systems they want. With the modern processor (compared to the N900) and the 6GB of RAM, performance seems to be totally usable on the Pro1.
neilv 6y ago
There's a pmOS effort to make the N900 hardware usable with modern kernel: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900) There was also a project to replace the hardware: https://neo900.org/ https://neo900.org/ When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet. That kind of thing is another reason to support efforts like pmOS.
- linmob 6y ago
  Another nice OS for the N900 is Maemo Leste (https://leste.meamo.org https://leste.meamo.org), which is basically the same software as ran originally, but modernized; sadly, when I last tried it, it still lacked a GUI for key features like calls and texts.
- toyg 6y ago
  > a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And then they pivoted to the Intel partnership just like that, from one day to the next, which meant jettisoning a massive amount of effort from the community (deb to rpm, effectively abandoning Qt, etc). It was really a strange relationship. They kept writing rivers of (digital) ink on their love for OSS and blablabla, but then took all major decisions behind closed doors.
  - neilv 6y ago
    Interesting. I wasn't involved at the time, and, when I went trying to reconstruct the open source afterwards, I suspected the ill-fated Microsoft deal might've had something to do with it. But sounds like there were problems before then. A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our collective understanding of this improved even within the last few years (e.g., community development processes like Rust's). (Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might also be forgetting things that people used to know -- repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way, and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier community foresee and avoid at the time.)
pessimizer 6y ago
> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  Maybe I wouldn't say "every way" (it doesn't age very well, several of my N900s have developed issues with their digitizers by now), but I do agree that it's superior. Much more accurate and pleasant to use than today's touchscreens; and way less prone to accidental touches. I have switched to a Librem 5 now, but I miss the N900's resistive screen.
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    The killer feature of a resistive screen IMO is its environmental resitance. It's not afraid of water, and can be used in gloves, or using any vaguely stick-shaped tool when your fingers are dirty.
- toopok4k3 6y ago
  Are you still stuck in 2008? Perhaps worked at Nokia? I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those screens felt! Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. I'm going to have to call this subjective, because, surprisingly, I've also used capacitive screens. I could use the N900 wet and in gloves, and it was pressure sensitive. Also, I once dropped it so hard that it broke a tiny piece of the sidewalk off (I tried to catch it while it was falling, and instead batted it and added velocity to the fall.) The screen was fine. I've never seen a cracked N900 screen. The only time it required a stylus is when I was using a desktop UI on it, making everything microscopic. If you did that with a capacitive screen it would require a special stylus, whereas with my N900, a toothpick would do.
Larrikin 6y ago
This was a neat phone to have during it's time, but I remember having it for a while and the killer app that came out months after I got the phone was MMS. The engineers at Nokia just couldn't figure it out but someone hacked on it long enough to enable it. Fairly certain they flew the guy out and offered him a job.
- frals 6y ago
  o/ Nokia had actually done the groundwork for a fair bit of MMS support and they were really helpful with answering questions (they even shipped a list of access point names in PR1.2 to make fMMS much easier to set up)... But yepp, I ended up working at Nokia afterwards :D
noipv4 6y ago
I loved the fact that the N900 in USA came with the new T-Mobile 3.5G band, which at that time (~2010) was quite congestion free.
toyg 6y ago
I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive too iirc). I attended an event with an "evangelist" here in Manchester, I was all fired up. It was some dude from Finland on a UK tour, and from the start it was all about the transition to QT on Symbian - this was to an audience full of people already working on iOS, to whom Symbian was a bad joke. He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty, but clearly it had just reached Finland or something. Maemo was a footnote, "oh yeah we have that too", it was absolutely clear he just didn't care for it - the future was QT on Symbian. People were snickering; I wanted to strangle him. I reckon he single-handedly destroyed any local interest in developing for Nokia. I gave up shortly afterwards, and then the burning-platform memo happened and that was it. My N900 is now an mp3 player for my 9yo son. The MicroUSB-B socket is a bit loose, iirc that was common with early adopters of that standard. The backlit keys have yellowed, or maybe the LEDs have. Everything else still works fine, although the software is obviously obsolete. My kid wonders why he has to press the screen that hard, and I feel like someone trying to explain ancient history. What a waste, Nokia, what a waste.
- Tor3 6y ago
  I used my N900 until a week ago, I finally moved the SIM card over to another phone (a dual-SIM one), because the (original) battery didn't take much charge anymore. Hardware-wise it's as good as new (mine is Made in Finland). Over the years I've used it to do support work in Antarctica using VPN from whatever cafeteria I was at at the time, other types of work where I needed a Linux computer and only had the phone, it's been running my minicomputer emulator, I did development work for it (the SDK running on my PC - basically a Debian setup), and, of course, as my phone. The MicroUSB socket was a weak point, the fix was to file off the two notches on microUSB cables before using them with the N900. So my N900's USB socket is still good as new.
  - 6y ago
noipv4 6y ago
It had amazing multitasking prowess for a 2010 phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Screenshot-20100703-034617.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Screens...
jhatemyjob 6y ago
> CTRL+F "pine" > 0 results what
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Guess why. Like Maemo and OpenMoko, absolutely nobody cares about PinePhone.
  - jhatemyjob 6y ago
    You're probably right, but right now it's state of the art
shmerl 6y ago
I still hope some viable and fully open Linux option will emerge that's not Android. And have good quality devices with that. Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused. I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland compositor and a normal Linux stack.
- fctorial 6y ago
  > Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused What drift?
  - shmerl 6y ago
    Rift between standard Linux stack and Android stack.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  (disclosure: I work for Purism) That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :) There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include software development.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - shmerl 6y ago
    That's a very good development for sure. I hope the hardware will be able to progress, since SoC choices for further improvements are very limited and the likes of Qualcomm are DOA.
  - summm 6y ago
    Sadly, neither of them are a match to even middle-class phones regarding hardware quality and performance.
subspaceman 6y ago
I was so excited about the N900 when it was announced - a linux machine in my pocket! I couldn't justify the price, being freshly out of school though. Nokia advertised a competition asking the public how they would "hack" the device to make something cool. I submitted a proposal to make a bike dashboard - it sounds so basic now, but I wanted a simple way to track my ride and proposed fun little additions like using the ambient light sensor to turn on an external headlight, a horn, etc. They picked my proposal along with a couple others and gave us some budget to buy hardware and components, and about 3 or 4 weeks to complete the project. It was my first time soldering, first time using an Arduino, and I remember being so stressed out about whether or not it would work. It all came together in the end and looking back with hindsight now, I really owe a lot to that competition and the phone that let me pretty quickly write python apps on it :) Good times.
- originalvichy 6y ago
  I got it as a graduation gift and it steered me into this field due to giving me a real contact with Unix/Linux and tinkering. I had tried Linux desktop but as a young gamer the moment browsing the web for the day was done, it was time to fire up Windows and play. The N900 was different. I didn't understand everything I was doing, but installing deb's, overclocking a CPU, installing Android v2.x, installing emulators, browsing forums for more tinkering (I could go on) was the thing that made me love computers more. Last but not least, it had a killer feature any fresh 18-year-old with friends that had cars loved back then: FM transmitter!! Back when AUX inputs were still a rarity and bluetooth was pairing... pairing... pairing... just pressing a button and tuning to a channel to get crystal clear audio was AMAZING. That and the IR blaster made for some nice party tricks.
thro234889898 6y ago
Shout out to SailfishOS which is the spiritual successor of Maemo.
- walterbell 6y ago
  What's the best Sony device to buy for running Sailfish?
  - throwdbaaway 6y ago
    For the best price/performance ratio, I will still go with XA2 for now. Here, I can get a used XA2 Ultra in like-new condition for less than $200. Sailfish 4.0 is fantastic, and with micro-g, the phone works perfectly fine as a daily driver. The same couldn't be said for N900 or N9, at least for me. J1 was rather slow but good enough, Xperia X was great for a year or so until Android 4.4 got churned, and now with Xperia XA2 and Xperia 10, we are finally there.
WildParser 6y ago
That keyboard was fantastic. I hope the PinePhone Keyboard will be able to reach this level.
nicklaf 6y ago
Heh. The N900 was an amazing device and I cherish the time I had with it. However, it's also a painful memory, because I managed to brick the device after spending possibly hundreds of hours customizing it. The first thing I did was let the micro USB port come loose--a common problem with the device, which seemed to happen to many over time. I remember still being able to charge it somehow (maybe I bought an external charger?). However, the nail in the coffin was when I was cleaning up some "unnecessary" cruft in the init directory, ostensibly to make the thing boot faster. What I discovered instead was that there was a watchdog that monitored for the existence of crucial files, and, failing to find them, the phone would reboot itself. So my glorious N900 was caught in a bootloop, and moreover without a functioning USB port to re-flash the operating system. Behind the battery, there are CPU pins that are directly exposed through a grid of copper pads. I made an attempt at wiring up a makeshift soldering job directly to the pins corresponding to a USB port, but failed to confidently pull off the dexterity to work with the small surface, as well as the care to do so without heating things up too much. Of course I believe there existed a development device with pins that directly clamped onto the pads, but if such a thing was publicly available it was probably hard to come by at affordable prices. I later tried to realize a similar experience to the N900 on Android using stuff like tmux and F-Droid. However, I have no good memories of any phone after my Nokia, and pretty much don't like phones at all at this point, and now just use my iPhone SE as a glorified flip phone with maps and a web browser.
- regularfry 6y ago
  Mine died to this. USB port came loose, sat in the back of a drawer waiting for me to get round to fixing it, to be thrown away in a fit of "I'm never going to get round to any of these 20+ projects-in-waiting that have been collecting dust for the past N years". The battery was probably knackered by that point anyway. Genuinely regretting that now.
rcarmo 6y ago
I still have one of these someplace in a drawer. Maemo was pretty nice, but the UX was all over the place sometimes and it became tedious to click through some menus with the stylus. Running a browser on it was doable, but the bit that really became a blocker for me was the lack of a fast, simple e-mail client (even non-touch screen Blackberries were better, and had slightly better keyboards).
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based browser and was based on Debian. You could build your own packages, add your own apt repositories, and people basically built most of Debian from source to run on it. E.g. I had a JVM running on it and a full LAMP stack at some point. The N800 was for a time the only device that could run Android (dual boot) and basically shared large parts of the kernel with it. Google used this device for early Android testing and probably owes a lot to Nokia engineers contributing patches to the Linux kernel. The first Nexus phone shipped quite late in the Android development process. Development of Meego saw several strategy changes that ultimately delayed products for a long time. One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT; effectively retiring all of the user facing UI. That set back the clock by years. And it got slowed down further by a simultaneous attempt to get Symbian on QT as well. That trainwreck of course ended up sucking up all the resources and failed to ultimately deliver the goods. This was in the middle of Nokia's realization that "oh fuck this iphone thing is real; we need a touch screen UI". It killed at least two touch screen platforms that it had before it came to that realization. Technically, the N800 was running circles around the first iphone in terms of what you could do on it. All it needed was a bit of hardware polish and a phone stack. Early Android had nothing on Meego. Even the UX was clumsy and it was slow and limited as well. But unlike Meego, Google shipped it and supported it and persisted in developing it. Nokia instead threw out the baby with the bathwater betting on several other horses before ultimately walking away from the whole phone business. Nokia declined to combine a phone stack + SIM card with the N770 and N800 deeming it to risky; they were protecting their deals with operators to basically cripple phones in favor of crappy operating services. E.g. bundling Skype with the n800 was controversial. It even did video calls with Skype. In 2007. The N800 was a tablet before the iphone, ipad or Android were a thing. There was not a lot else in the market at that point. That thing with a phone stack would have been a killer product despite its many limitations. The N900 and the later N9 were both labelled as developer phones and cut off from any serious marketing effort. The N9 technically was a decent phone but by the time it shipped, the team had been layed off, the platform cancelled and Nokia was endorsing Windows Phone. It also shipped an Android phone around the same time, leaving the ugly job of cancelling that product to Microsoft after the acquisition. Samsung's Bada is a direct decendent of Meego. It never really gained any market share against Android and it seems Samsung pretty much gave up on it.
purpleidea 6y ago
It was the best device I ever had. Still is. The GTK+Linux+GNU was beautiful. Proved how much potential GTK and the platform has.
inglor_cz 6y ago
I was a Symbian developer at that time. The fate of N900 is a grim reminder that engineering brilliance will still lose out to managerial incompetence. Seriously, the device was just so attractive both for users and programmers. If Nokia were able to stay the course, they could pull off a bestseller. Their nosedive into the ground under Stephen Elop is a stuff of dark legends.
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  Not really. Even before Elop, there were multiple layer of management and the culture of CMA (Cover My Arse) was so strong, as I heard from other Nokia ex-employees. Not to mention people from Symbian Inc wasn't good people according to the book about rise and fall of Symbian.
  - markb139 6y ago
    It's interesting how devices have gone. Nokia, when they were focused, were making devices smaller, cheaper and with improved battery life. Now we get these giant devices that need re-charging daily and cost >£1000
    - simonh 6y ago
      It's a good point. I think it highlights the fact that these are not really the same kinds of device, so can't be evaluated on the same criteria. If we were still just buying phones nobody would spend that much on something that consumes so much power. The mistake Nokia and the others made was they thought the iPhone was just a phone.
      - ddalex 6y ago
        I still remember a Nokia sales rep telling me when iPhone just hitting the shelves that the lack of stylus for input will doom it.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I can confirm it was to some extent like that. The first maemo tablets did not have radio to avoid competion with Symbian, and devices like S90, for example.
kkarimi 6y ago
Still my favourite device all these years later
ebfe1 6y ago
Had my N900 when it first came out and to this day it is still my most favourite device! I kept it for a long time as 2nd device, I had pwnphone on it for a ages and showed off to friends how i could Deauth all their wifi devices, run kismet, even crack WEP, turn off their TV with tvbgone app using infrared...

241 points by tate 6y ago

The N900 was fantastic. The phone was to be a leader until Stephen Elop. Elop was a Microsoft employee who never stopped being a microsoft employee. As fake ceo of nokia he convinced the board to switch to microsoft OS and drop their success. Nokia did that and then when Nokia sales plummetted to disasterous level he proposed selling that division to Microsoft at quite the discount. Afterall who wants to buy a failing division. 11,000 employees laid off because of Elop's incompetence. What the board should have done was fire Elop very publicly and move right back to the Linux ecosystem. They had a leg up to basically be what Pinephone, chinaphones, and so many other phones are trying to be.

Black101 6y ago

I wish I could own a phone like this today. Too bad companies are so cheap that they can only produce keyboardless phones with widescreens...

opan 6y ago
There is the PinePhone, and a keyboard attachment is actively being worked on. https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/ https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/ > PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well – but we’re still waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this month There are pictures as well.

gt565k 6y ago

I miss good quality phones with replaceable batteries and sd card slots.

z3t4 6y ago

Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.

whereistimbo 6y ago
I wonder why Nokia didn't go to Android route. It's like it still want to have a platform where it is seen as king and not as another commodity player. Or maybe Nokia was just having a pet peeve with Google.
- mavhc 6y ago
  Nokia was a hardware company, they didn't value software. They'd design a phone, and then pick an OS to run on it at the last minute.

indymike 6y ago

If you go back a little bit, there are a few devices that really were forks in the road for the industry. Probably the biggest, most important: * Commodore Amiga * Psion PDAs * Nokia N900 * Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone) All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dustbin because of business issues.

krtkush 6y ago
I would add Nokia N9 too.
mrweasel 6y ago
The Amiga is a little weird, I think it had to many custom chips to be successful. The PC succeeded because of the clones. Cloning the Amiga would be insanely hard, because only Commodore had access to chips required to make the Amiga run.

dkarl 6y ago

I owned one of the Nokia tablets, maybe the N770. I carried it everywhere with me for months, until I had to admit I just didn't want to use it. When something came up that required me to access my email or use the web, rather than pull out the Nokia, I would wait and do it at home if at all possible. (I didn't yet carry a laptop everywhere.) It's interesting now to think I had this with me 24/7 for months and it didn't change my life at all. Same with the Palm V I owned before it. All the exciting ideas were there in the zeitgeist (portable general purpose computer in my pocket! ubiquitous instant access to information!) but the technology couldn't realize them yet.

wazoox 6y ago

Ah yeah. There was a bug in the WiFi applet that prevented it to use 64 characters WPA2 passwords; only 63 could be entered in the field. Source: my company's WiFi was 64 characters, and the one employee with an N900 couldn't connect :)

pabs3 6y ago

I hear that the N900 is the best supported mobile device in mainline Linux, except perhaps for the PowerVR GPU, although there are rumours ImgTec are writing an open source driver for Linux & Mesa for PowerVR.

seba_dos1 6y ago
I've heard those rumors for about 10 years already though :)

alex_duf 6y ago

The N9 was the first phone I know to be able to switch apps or close apps using the swipe movement. It was really hard moving to android as I missed the swiping to navigate the OS. Now Apple is using swiping and all the cool kids think it's cool again. But like any good hipster I can tell you I was doing it before it was cool.

dntrkv 6y ago
I think the Palm WebOS was really ahead of it's time with how they handled multiple apps as "cards." The iOS UI is basically a clone of their approach. The Palm Pre brought some really interesting concepts to smartphones at the time.

speeder 6y ago

Nokia behaviour in Brazil infuriates me. 1. The burning platform thingy happened when Nokia was absolutely dominating Brazillian smartphone market, people had even ported Counter-Strike to Symbian! Then suddenly it was dead, and didn't even get replaced by iPhone as the memo predicted, instead it got replaced by chinese no-name phones (until the government got annoyed and banned them outright... if you use a imported phone, cell towers can kick it out of the network) 2. Nokia abandoned all their business here for some years. 3. Nokia is now back, but all they do is half-hearteadly sell some crappy androids, they KaiOS market is booming in India, and has much potential in Brazil, but they refuse to sell KaiOS phones here, and you can't import them (because they get kicked out of the network by the cell towers), meanwhile local companies are making crappy KaiOS phones and doing reasonably well.

nfriedly 6y ago

+1 for the GPD call out! I have a GPD Win Max, and while I mostly use it for playing games, I have done some programing and networking work on it. Although I feel like the GPD MicroPC might be of more interest to the type of person who would have gone for a N900. It's a bit smaller than the Pocket 2 that they linked to, while at the same time having a better port selection - https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc

twobitshifter 6y ago

I remember trying to get the successor N9 which was DOA due to the announcement of the Microsoft deal. Nokia had their platform to go up against Android and Apple, but it was simply too late. I think the N9 compares favorably against both iPhones and Android at the time, and Nokia was ahead in terms of cameras.

danans 6y ago

I had an N810 (predecessor to the N900), and it was very cool - at the time, it really felt like "the future". However, I must admit that I liked it for what it was -a toy - and not for what it could actually do in a productive sense. At the end of the day, it wasn't possible to perform any sustained productive activity on it. In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an inverse relationship between the portability and the productivity of a computing device. This is particularly true for types work that involves mentally integrating and generating large (for the human mind) amounts of information like code - but also for reviewing documents, managing financial accounts (interacting with a large spreadsheet on a phone is a nightmare). It's why at the end of the day, most engineers and architects (whether in software or real engineers in the physical realm), get most of their work done in front of large screens with full size keyboards (or at least large laptops). This isn't to say that there aren't niche use cases or circumstances where a Linux computer in your pocket isn't extremely useful - the example always rolled out being "remote administration" of a server - but even these tend to be exceptions. It's nearly always better to accomplish remote administration tasks from a laptop.

pessimizer 6y ago
I hate to keep evangelizing about the N900, but I didn't bring my laptop on business trips to conferences (i.e. non-coding business trips.) The N900 was enough for me to ssh work I had to do at the office, and enough for me for everything else. My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|" wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a screen touch to get to.
- danans 6y ago
  I fully believe and acknowledge that for some very niche use cases, this might work. In particular, the specific use case of "ssh to a server and run a few commands". But even in that example, if the output of the command is many pages of error or logging output that you need to diagnose, the tiny screen and keyboard are going to become ineffective very quickly. Even while at a conference and doing conference-y things like modifying, giving, or reviewing presentations, a bigger screen and keyboard are pretty indispensable.

CharleFKane 6y ago

I got in a little late: some of my friends bought N770s early on, but I didn't get in until the N800. I own (still) an N800 and an N810. Though I haven't picked up either in a while, I thought they were nifty devices at the time, and should pick them back up again. I still think they have a lot going for them. (The N800 was actually the first mobile navigation system I ever used, with an external Bluetooth GPS and software based on OpenStreetMaps.) I was unable to find an N900 anywhere when it was new. I was met with pretty much blank stares. Eventually, an online vendor got some refurbished N900s in stock at a good price. I ordered one, got it, plugged it in overnight to charge... ...and in the morning, it was totally dead. I emailed the vendor and asked for an exchange because, you know, one bad one out of the bunch, they were refurbs anyway, no problem. The vendor wrote back and told me that they had received a batch of 28 of them. ALL the ones they got had some sort of problem that resulted in a return, they would not be getting any more of them, and if I sent it back they'd give me a refund. Thus ended my N900 experiment.

SeanLuke 6y ago

I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed. Because the interface was really terrible. It was so bad I even made an article about it here: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in many respects of course, but its interface was elegant, consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful. I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking that you didn't need one. And boy did it show. Also, terrible battery life.

SotirisMak 6y ago

After 10 years and still reading the same, as we stuck in the past. The bad Symbian, if Elop was a Trojan horse or was just a scapegoat, a deflection. What strikes me is the love and admiration for a product that proudly can claim that was from the very start. Privileged to be part of that diverse "mutant" team made by Ari, Ansi, Raouf and Yannick. Ideologically satisfied that we supported open-source projects and financed their development. At the same time, Im also curious why no one talks if a security framework was designed to protect the privacy, of billions, of consumers. Or if the EU was ready to offer digital protection by investing in companies and the relevant ecosystem. Bottom line, the issue was never simple, was very complex and multidimensional, perhaps geopolitical at the core. Take for example the Huawei case, Finland is too important to the west to be embarrassed in the same way. So complex environment to explain that an Elop needed to clear the mess, take the blame and move on. For me the outcome had positive effects, Finland became a startup nation. All Meego employees evolved their careers in global companies. I dare to claim that Microsoft adapting Linux was caused by the infusion of Meego people through the acquisition. So be happy that you were part of a profound change, as fans or contributors. The key question now that I have for you. What is the next step beyond Meego, Jolla? How Gnu/Linux can make a comeback into mass-market commercial products? How a 150-year-old company such as Nokia can benefit from that? How consumers can benefit from Linux products? What is the evolution of Linux in relation to AI? How the related communities and fans can be united to create new business models and services? Bottom line, instead of being nostalgic, let’s use our passion to create something new. Please accept my intellectual challenge and engage by offering answers. Surely, being nostalgic is making me depressed when thinking about the lost opportunities. Im here and available for something new and big. So please inspire me with new ideas!

wartron 6y ago

Before this was a "feature phone" the Nokia 9000, i loved it. When this was out I was using the OG Motorola Droid. I wanted one of these but they were not available on my carrier so I stayed on the Droid line. The hot-dog slide keyboard was amazing. I had full terminal control from these. Nowadays I actually still rock a 2017 iphone SE; dimensions wise I don't want anything bigger in width or height, but i would gladly add some thickness to get a full tactile keyboard again.

bzzzt 6y ago
I used an N900 for a few years (got one with the early adopter discount when it was released). While the keyboard was miles ahead of all the on-screen stuff at the time I don't think I want to go back to that keyboard from a current decent touch-screen phone. The keys were a bit too small for fast typing...
- u801e 6y ago
  I wonder how it compared to the keyboard on the N97. Though it was a symbian based phone, the putty client allowed you to connect to a server and attach to a screen or tmux session, which worked okay with that keyboard and a few on-screen buttons.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  The key size is alright, I'm able to type on it much faster than on a touchscreen - provided that I don't need to use anything else than regular letters. The most painful thing on that keyboard is lack of 4th row of keys.

finchisko 6y ago

Still have this little linux phone. It missed compass hw, so map experience was not great and also resistive display was inferior to iPhone, but still loved it. It's bad Nokia didn't manage it create viable platform, but rather switched to Windows phones and also died there with broken teeth.

u801e 6y ago
They had released the N9 and there was a developer only N950. I'm still using my N9 even today though the lock mechanism on the SIM holder no longer works.
- gymnodemi 6y ago
  Wow, I had to abandon my N9 after all of my fixes including buying a new SIM holder failed. I still have my N9 and my N900. I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer. It easily beat all of the Android phones at that time. I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired and the SIM holder wasn't horked.
  - u801e 6y ago
    > I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer I think we have Stephan Elop to thank for that. I never really understood why Nokia didn't just focus on the market outside the US. Had they continued producing phones like the N9, I'm sure they could have retained a lot of market share in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. > I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired I'm not sure whether all of the CAs had expired, but I wonder if it would be possible to get an updated package with up to date CAs. The main issue I have is that it can't negotiate an agreed upon cipher when trying to establish a TLS connection. I'm still able to use the Firefox browser to browse a number of websites like Facebook and Reddit. Hacker news still works with the built-in browser. Facebook sometimes works with the default browser and the old subdomain reddit website will lock up the default browser in my experience (the current reddit website layout is a no-go).
  - kbr2000 6y ago

scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990-2020. Apparently when the iPhone was announced the whole company was in deep shock and disarray. They were planning on the first touchscreen phones hitting the market around 2010-2015, and here was a company promising to deliver one by 2008.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 6y ago
Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd dislocated the screen. Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before Samsung arrived.
- gambler 6y ago
  >Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.
- 908B64B197 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

I loved the Nokia N900's design, that hardware keyboard that made it so easy to do remote system administration over SSH, or keep doing everything that I want to do in Emacs just like on my laptop or desktop computers. Also like all Nokia phones of the time, it was nearly indestructible and could easily survive drops that would destroy a modern smartphone’s screen or casing. However, in retrospect not all was rosy. Advocates of Linux phones today would prefer to avoid binary blobs that make upgrades impossible (the N900 is forever stuck on kernel 2.6) and a cellular modem connected directly to main memory.

ggus 6y ago
The design has been re-proposed a few times, notably the F(x)tec PRO¹ looks really similar and cool. https://www.fxtec.com/pro1 https://www.fxtec.com/pro1
u801e 6y ago
I wish I had the opportunity to use the N900. I still have a partially working N9 (the SIM holder lock is broken meaning I have to hold the SIM in to use it for calls). I still browse and post on HN using it on occasion.
- tominated 6y ago
  I still have my N9 lying around somewhere - had to get the sim tray replaced two or three times but otherwise I loved it. How did you update the security certificates? I tried to boot mine up a while back but it was basically unusable on the web because of HTTPS.
  - u801e 6y ago
    I haven't updated the security certificates so far, bit I don't think that most of the TLS connection issues are due to expired CA certificates in the certificate bundle. I believe it's because it can't negotiate a mutually agreed upon cipher. It still works with a few websites like this one. In fact, I'm using my N9 to post this comment :-).
- 6y ago

gtk40 6y ago

I had a Nokia N800 "Internet Tablet" and loved that device. Android was a huge downgrade compared to what you could do with that in every way except interface, and the interface wasn't too bad.

dbish 6y ago
Same. In college I would show it off while working at the IT desk by sshing into the computer lab machines and checking on running programs/homework/etc. Used a bluetooth keyboard for the full "hacker-on-the-go" experience
serf 6y ago
I had an N800 and and N900 afterwards. I used the N800 until the battery eventually failed. It was amazingly liberating, as a 'computer person', to have a truly hand-held computer; all my friends and family thought it was a stupid toy with a hard-to-understand interface -- but they liked drawing on it.
- jbj 6y ago
  I had an N800 and found it so amazing, 2 sd card slots, pop out camera that could rotate, and a useful kickstand. I recently found the Planet Computers devices and tried their first version out, it is conceptually a bit similar to the fxtec mentioned in the blog post.
squarefoot 6y ago
I had the older 770, and loved it with all its limitations. I recall downloading Google maps images of a desired area trough a 3rd party tool that would also stitch them together, then and using them on the 770 with an external GPS receiver to have sort of a live map while driving. And the LCARS Star Trek styled screen gave a nice touch too. Nokia was developing great products back then, then one day Microsoft came and ended it all.
- Tor3 6y ago
  Did the same with my N800 while driving in South Africa. The downloaded satellite maps showed the roads that were actually there, unlike those on the maps.. and that was very important, as it turned out. Very glad we had that N800. (I had the N800 first, and got the N900 when it came out)

jart 6y ago

My favorite device from that era was the HP Jornada since that with linux and an orinoco card felt like something straight out of the hacking movies. https://youtu.be/1s-tekLn7Nc https://youtu.be/1s-tekLn7Nc

egfx 6y ago
Interesting I didn’t know about this device. I had the HP Pre3. Looking at this is like watching the evolution of dinosaurs to mammals in a way.

wmf 6y ago

Thom makes a really insightful point: "people who want a true Linux computer in their pocket". I wanted a more open iPhone and I hated the N900 because it was terrible as a smartphone. Between the stylus, unconstrained multitasking, desktop Firefox, and Flash it's like they were trying to prove Steve Jobs right. The G2 was so much better because it had an actual phone OS.

tom_mellior 6y ago
What's wrong with unconstrained multitasking? I thought it worked well on the N900. I also think it works well on Android.
- bestouff 6y ago
  On Android it's very constrained. Background apps are quickly killed to save battery, whereas on my N900 any running app which wouldn't stop by itself would drain it in a few minutes.
- sp332 6y ago
  Apps can't even reliably sync data on Android without using a special Google-hosted remote service that pings your phone when there is an update. Music apps have to register specially so they don't get killed in the background.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    Android is constrained in that sense, I agree. I thought the OP meant constrained like iPhones of the period were: No pretense of multitasking, every task switch being "close an app, open another one".
regularfry 6y ago
I liked the stylus. More precise than a fingertip, which it wanted to be on a screen that small. Although you could use a fingernail too, in a pinch. People pointed at the resistive screen as evidence it wasn't as good as an iPhone, but the thing is that it was a very, very good resistive screen. High resolution, accurate, and you didn't need to mash it to get it to register.

windsurfer 6y ago

I have both an N900 and a Pro1 and it's everything I wanted in a phone/device. I'm using self-compiled LineageOS on it right now and it is as "Linux-y" as I need and want, complete with a usable terminal and SSH apps. I'm not sure why you haven't been able to get a review unit of the new Pro1-x model, but I'll get in contact with someone at f(x)tec for you.

skykooler 6y ago
One thing from the N900 that I really miss on the Pro1 is the ability to multi-boot different operating systems. I think at one point I had five OS's running on my N900, mostly off of various microSD cards - Maemo, Android, Meego, SHR and Plasma Mobile. For the Pro1 I'd settle for being able to dual-boot Sailfish and LineageOS, but as it is now you need to pick one or the other.
- windsurfer 6y ago
  Many people in the community are getting around this limitation by running virtual machines of the various operating systems they want. With the modern processor (compared to the N900) and the 6GB of RAM, performance seems to be totally usable on the Pro1.

neilv 6y ago

There's a pmOS effort to make the N900 hardware usable with modern kernel: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900) There was also a project to replace the hardware: https://neo900.org/ https://neo900.org/ When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet. That kind of thing is another reason to support efforts like pmOS.

linmob 6y ago
Another nice OS for the N900 is Maemo Leste (https://leste.meamo.org https://leste.meamo.org), which is basically the same software as ran originally, but modernized; sadly, when I last tried it, it still lacked a GUI for key features like calls and texts.
toyg 6y ago
> a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And then they pivoted to the Intel partnership just like that, from one day to the next, which meant jettisoning a massive amount of effort from the community (deb to rpm, effectively abandoning Qt, etc). It was really a strange relationship. They kept writing rivers of (digital) ink on their love for OSS and blablabla, but then took all major decisions behind closed doors.
- neilv 6y ago
  Interesting. I wasn't involved at the time, and, when I went trying to reconstruct the open source afterwards, I suspected the ill-fated Microsoft deal might've had something to do with it. But sounds like there were problems before then. A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our collective understanding of this improved even within the last few years (e.g., community development processes like Rust's). (Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might also be forgetting things that people used to know -- repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way, and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier community foresee and avoid at the time.)

pessimizer 6y ago

> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.

seba_dos1 6y ago
Maybe I wouldn't say "every way" (it doesn't age very well, several of my N900s have developed issues with their digitizers by now), but I do agree that it's superior. Much more accurate and pleasant to use than today's touchscreens; and way less prone to accidental touches. I have switched to a Librem 5 now, but I miss the N900's resistive screen.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  The killer feature of a resistive screen IMO is its environmental resitance. It's not afraid of water, and can be used in gloves, or using any vaguely stick-shaped tool when your fingers are dirty.
toopok4k3 6y ago
Are you still stuck in 2008? Perhaps worked at Nokia? I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those screens felt! Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. I'm going to have to call this subjective, because, surprisingly, I've also used capacitive screens. I could use the N900 wet and in gloves, and it was pressure sensitive. Also, I once dropped it so hard that it broke a tiny piece of the sidewalk off (I tried to catch it while it was falling, and instead batted it and added velocity to the fall.) The screen was fine. I've never seen a cracked N900 screen. The only time it required a stylus is when I was using a desktop UI on it, making everything microscopic. If you did that with a capacitive screen it would require a special stylus, whereas with my N900, a toothpick would do.

Larrikin 6y ago

This was a neat phone to have during it's time, but I remember having it for a while and the killer app that came out months after I got the phone was MMS. The engineers at Nokia just couldn't figure it out but someone hacked on it long enough to enable it. Fairly certain they flew the guy out and offered him a job.

frals 6y ago
o/ Nokia had actually done the groundwork for a fair bit of MMS support and they were really helpful with answering questions (they even shipped a list of access point names in PR1.2 to make fMMS much easier to set up)... But yepp, I ended up working at Nokia afterwards :D

noipv4 6y ago

I loved the fact that the N900 in USA came with the new T-Mobile 3.5G band, which at that time (~2010) was quite congestion free.

toyg 6y ago

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive too iirc). I attended an event with an "evangelist" here in Manchester, I was all fired up. It was some dude from Finland on a UK tour, and from the start it was all about the transition to QT on Symbian - this was to an audience full of people already working on iOS, to whom Symbian was a bad joke. He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty, but clearly it had just reached Finland or something. Maemo was a footnote, "oh yeah we have that too", it was absolutely clear he just didn't care for it - the future was QT on Symbian. People were snickering; I wanted to strangle him. I reckon he single-handedly destroyed any local interest in developing for Nokia. I gave up shortly afterwards, and then the burning-platform memo happened and that was it. My N900 is now an mp3 player for my 9yo son. The MicroUSB-B socket is a bit loose, iirc that was common with early adopters of that standard. The backlit keys have yellowed, or maybe the LEDs have. Everything else still works fine, although the software is obviously obsolete. My kid wonders why he has to press the screen that hard, and I feel like someone trying to explain ancient history. What a waste, Nokia, what a waste.

Tor3 6y ago
I used my N900 until a week ago, I finally moved the SIM card over to another phone (a dual-SIM one), because the (original) battery didn't take much charge anymore. Hardware-wise it's as good as new (mine is Made in Finland). Over the years I've used it to do support work in Antarctica using VPN from whatever cafeteria I was at at the time, other types of work where I needed a Linux computer and only had the phone, it's been running my minicomputer emulator, I did development work for it (the SDK running on my PC - basically a Debian setup), and, of course, as my phone. The MicroUSB socket was a weak point, the fix was to file off the two notches on microUSB cables before using them with the N900. So my N900's USB socket is still good as new.
- 6y ago

noipv4 6y ago

It had amazing multitasking prowess for a 2010 phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Screenshot-20100703-034617.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Screens...

jhatemyjob 6y ago

> CTRL+F "pine" > 0 results what

jeffbee 6y ago
Guess why. Like Maemo and OpenMoko, absolutely nobody cares about PinePhone.
- jhatemyjob 6y ago
  You're probably right, but right now it's state of the art

shmerl 6y ago

I still hope some viable and fully open Linux option will emerge that's not Android. And have good quality devices with that. Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused. I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland compositor and a normal Linux stack.

fctorial 6y ago
> Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused What drift?
- shmerl 6y ago
  Rift between standard Linux stack and Android stack.
seba_dos1 6y ago
(disclosure: I work for Purism) That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :) There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include software development.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shmerl 6y ago
  That's a very good development for sure. I hope the hardware will be able to progress, since SoC choices for further improvements are very limited and the likes of Qualcomm are DOA.
- summm 6y ago
  Sadly, neither of them are a match to even middle-class phones regarding hardware quality and performance.

subspaceman 6y ago

I was so excited about the N900 when it was announced - a linux machine in my pocket! I couldn't justify the price, being freshly out of school though. Nokia advertised a competition asking the public how they would "hack" the device to make something cool. I submitted a proposal to make a bike dashboard - it sounds so basic now, but I wanted a simple way to track my ride and proposed fun little additions like using the ambient light sensor to turn on an external headlight, a horn, etc. They picked my proposal along with a couple others and gave us some budget to buy hardware and components, and about 3 or 4 weeks to complete the project. It was my first time soldering, first time using an Arduino, and I remember being so stressed out about whether or not it would work. It all came together in the end and looking back with hindsight now, I really owe a lot to that competition and the phone that let me pretty quickly write python apps on it :) Good times.

originalvichy 6y ago
I got it as a graduation gift and it steered me into this field due to giving me a real contact with Unix/Linux and tinkering. I had tried Linux desktop but as a young gamer the moment browsing the web for the day was done, it was time to fire up Windows and play. The N900 was different. I didn't understand everything I was doing, but installing deb's, overclocking a CPU, installing Android v2.x, installing emulators, browsing forums for more tinkering (I could go on) was the thing that made me love computers more. Last but not least, it had a killer feature any fresh 18-year-old with friends that had cars loved back then: FM transmitter!! Back when AUX inputs were still a rarity and bluetooth was pairing... pairing... pairing... just pressing a button and tuning to a channel to get crystal clear audio was AMAZING. That and the IR blaster made for some nice party tricks.

thro234889898 6y ago

Shout out to SailfishOS which is the spiritual successor of Maemo.

walterbell 6y ago
What's the best Sony device to buy for running Sailfish?
- throwdbaaway 6y ago
  For the best price/performance ratio, I will still go with XA2 for now. Here, I can get a used XA2 Ultra in like-new condition for less than $200. Sailfish 4.0 is fantastic, and with micro-g, the phone works perfectly fine as a daily driver. The same couldn't be said for N900 or N9, at least for me. J1 was rather slow but good enough, Xperia X was great for a year or so until Android 4.4 got churned, and now with Xperia XA2 and Xperia 10, we are finally there.

WildParser 6y ago

That keyboard was fantastic. I hope the PinePhone Keyboard will be able to reach this level.

nicklaf 6y ago

Heh. The N900 was an amazing device and I cherish the time I had with it. However, it's also a painful memory, because I managed to brick the device after spending possibly hundreds of hours customizing it. The first thing I did was let the micro USB port come loose--a common problem with the device, which seemed to happen to many over time. I remember still being able to charge it somehow (maybe I bought an external charger?). However, the nail in the coffin was when I was cleaning up some "unnecessary" cruft in the init directory, ostensibly to make the thing boot faster. What I discovered instead was that there was a watchdog that monitored for the existence of crucial files, and, failing to find them, the phone would reboot itself. So my glorious N900 was caught in a bootloop, and moreover without a functioning USB port to re-flash the operating system. Behind the battery, there are CPU pins that are directly exposed through a grid of copper pads. I made an attempt at wiring up a makeshift soldering job directly to the pins corresponding to a USB port, but failed to confidently pull off the dexterity to work with the small surface, as well as the care to do so without heating things up too much. Of course I believe there existed a development device with pins that directly clamped onto the pads, but if such a thing was publicly available it was probably hard to come by at affordable prices. I later tried to realize a similar experience to the N900 on Android using stuff like tmux and F-Droid. However, I have no good memories of any phone after my Nokia, and pretty much don't like phones at all at this point, and now just use my iPhone SE as a glorified flip phone with maps and a web browser.

regularfry 6y ago
Mine died to this. USB port came loose, sat in the back of a drawer waiting for me to get round to fixing it, to be thrown away in a fit of "I'm never going to get round to any of these 20+ projects-in-waiting that have been collecting dust for the past N years". The battery was probably knackered by that point anyway. Genuinely regretting that now.

rcarmo 6y ago

I still have one of these someplace in a drawer. Maemo was pretty nice, but the UX was all over the place sometimes and it became tedious to click through some menus with the stylus. Running a browser on it was doable, but the bit that really became a blocker for me was the lack of a fast, simple e-mail client (even non-touch screen Blackberries were better, and had slightly better keyboards).

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based browser and was based on Debian. You could build your own packages, add your own apt repositories, and people basically built most of Debian from source to run on it. E.g. I had a JVM running on it and a full LAMP stack at some point. The N800 was for a time the only device that could run Android (dual boot) and basically shared large parts of the kernel with it. Google used this device for early Android testing and probably owes a lot to Nokia engineers contributing patches to the Linux kernel. The first Nexus phone shipped quite late in the Android development process. Development of Meego saw several strategy changes that ultimately delayed products for a long time. One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT; effectively retiring all of the user facing UI. That set back the clock by years. And it got slowed down further by a simultaneous attempt to get Symbian on QT as well. That trainwreck of course ended up sucking up all the resources and failed to ultimately deliver the goods. This was in the middle of Nokia's realization that "oh fuck this iphone thing is real; we need a touch screen UI". It killed at least two touch screen platforms that it had before it came to that realization. Technically, the N800 was running circles around the first iphone in terms of what you could do on it. All it needed was a bit of hardware polish and a phone stack. Early Android had nothing on Meego. Even the UX was clumsy and it was slow and limited as well. But unlike Meego, Google shipped it and supported it and persisted in developing it. Nokia instead threw out the baby with the bathwater betting on several other horses before ultimately walking away from the whole phone business. Nokia declined to combine a phone stack + SIM card with the N770 and N800 deeming it to risky; they were protecting their deals with operators to basically cripple phones in favor of crappy operating services. E.g. bundling Skype with the n800 was controversial. It even did video calls with Skype. In 2007. The N800 was a tablet before the iphone, ipad or Android were a thing. There was not a lot else in the market at that point. That thing with a phone stack would have been a killer product despite its many limitations. The N900 and the later N9 were both labelled as developer phones and cut off from any serious marketing effort. The N9 technically was a decent phone but by the time it shipped, the team had been layed off, the platform cancelled and Nokia was endorsing Windows Phone. It also shipped an Android phone around the same time, leaving the ugly job of cancelling that product to Microsoft after the acquisition. Samsung's Bada is a direct decendent of Meego. It never really gained any market share against Android and it seems Samsung pretty much gave up on it.

purpleidea 6y ago

It was the best device I ever had. Still is. The GTK+Linux+GNU was beautiful. Proved how much potential GTK and the platform has.

inglor_cz 6y ago

I was a Symbian developer at that time. The fate of N900 is a grim reminder that engineering brilliance will still lose out to managerial incompetence. Seriously, the device was just so attractive both for users and programmers. If Nokia were able to stay the course, they could pull off a bestseller. Their nosedive into the ground under Stephen Elop is a stuff of dark legends.

whereistimbo 6y ago
Not really. Even before Elop, there were multiple layer of management and the culture of CMA (Cover My Arse) was so strong, as I heard from other Nokia ex-employees. Not to mention people from Symbian Inc wasn't good people according to the book about rise and fall of Symbian.
- markb139 6y ago
  It's interesting how devices have gone. Nokia, when they were focused, were making devices smaller, cheaper and with improved battery life. Now we get these giant devices that need re-charging daily and cost >£1000
  - simonh 6y ago
    It's a good point. I think it highlights the fact that these are not really the same kinds of device, so can't be evaluated on the same criteria. If we were still just buying phones nobody would spend that much on something that consumes so much power. The mistake Nokia and the others made was they thought the iPhone was just a phone.
    - ddalex 6y ago
      I still remember a Nokia sales rep telling me when iPhone just hitting the shelves that the lack of stylus for input will doom it.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I can confirm it was to some extent like that. The first maemo tablets did not have radio to avoid competion with Symbian, and devices like S90, for example.

kkarimi 6y ago

Still my favourite device all these years later

ebfe1 6y ago

Had my N900 when it first came out and to this day it is still my most favourite device! I kept it for a long time as 2nd device, I had pwnphone on it for a ages and showed off to friends how i could Deauth all their wifi devices, run kismet, even crack WEP, turn off their TV with tvbgone app using infrared...