Nokia tried this in 2009. They released the n900 phone which IMO was the best phone ever made. It came with a full version of linux on it, with a hardware keyb

Nokia tried this in 2009. They released the n900 phone which IMO was the best phone ever made. It came with a full version of linux on it, with a hardware keyboard. Their marketing around it was that it was 'the hackers phone', and they started trying to build a community around it by launching competitions and advertising the best hacks and out of the box ideas which could be achieved on the phone. I remember running aircrack-ng on it to crack wifi handshakes which could be captuered on the stock phone. Running nmap etc, war driving. It truly was incredible. As expected though, it died in the water. There was such little uptake in the community that nokia stopped developing the Maemo OS it had made for it, and silently killed the brand. I sometimes like to imagine what could have been achieved if they had pressed on with that product line and the marketing which encouraged breaking the norm and creating something cool on your phone.