7 ms·

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device. I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Fin

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device. I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that. I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.

xyzzy123 10mo ago
Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
- mikestorrent 10mo ago
  So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be. I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
  - eru 10mo ago
    > I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
    - mikestorrent 10mo ago
      If nobody actually sees an AI saying a bad word, is it saying it?
girvo 10mo ago
Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live
- Sharlin 10mo ago
  It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.
  - ITniggah 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - girvo 10mo ago
      N9, not the N900! Meego Harmattan was so much nicer for day to day usage
  - carlosjobim 10mo ago
    Not directed at you, but what kind of person would [flag] and [dead] the other reply to your comment? Talk about not having a life! As for the N9, it still has the most modern and beautiful GUI of any smart device, 15 years after being discontinued. It will take at least 15 more years for iOS or Android to reach that level, if ever. The physical design was also very nice and refined. For those who don't believe me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY
    - pessimizer 10mo ago
      I always thought that flagging would get the comment put into a review queue (one that would put even your ability to flag at risk), but it seems that mass flagging gets you an automated flagkill of late. People can get flagkilled for not sufficiently loving particular products or for not being orthorexic enough. As for the N900, I just wanted one or two more hardware iterations (the design flaws were annoying, and a couple mentioned in the OP.) The N9 looked great, but I couldn't get over the loss of the keyboard (although of course that was our dictated future.) The Meego transition seemed unnecessary and annoying (not the UI changes, but everything else), especially the move to rpms from debs. They were just hostile to Debian mainline for some reason; if they had been less hostile, their work would have survived without a break even after Elop intentionally tanked the company. That proprietary moat is just irresistible. iOS and Android literally grabbed the designers of Maemo/Meego and WebOS to update their horrible UIs. Back then, they were still even refusing to multitask. Android copied WebOS almost exactly.
testfrequency 10mo ago
My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien monologue scenes. It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.
theshrike79 10mo ago
The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
Tor3 10mo ago
My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well. As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  Have you seen the GPD pocket 4? There's a 4G option, but unfortunately not one for 5G (yet?) https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2 https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2
larodi 10mo ago
It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly. But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps. The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  The underlying OS makes no difference. BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix. What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too. Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on. Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
  - larodi 10mo ago
    Good design of the packaging has nothing to do with underlying OS, unless say it overheats a lot. TBH, the N900 had a fair design, I've used one, not talking from a bystander view, and it was good indeed. Save for the keyboard that perhaps costs 30% the device in order to be where it was (sliding and all). But also, the Nokia Nx's were slow as hell compared to iOS. > The underlying OS makes no difference. perhaps you've never experienced the bliss after setting up a BSD that just works 10 years after... and have never experienced the incredibly stable and snappy multiprocessing this miracle of a kernel (and OS) exhibits for decades now. Let me tell you something - 20 years ago Linux was slow and unstasble as shit, and even slower on embedded. On the other hand FreeBSD and other BSD-derivates were super stable, but took more effort to setup and work with. They did not have the UI though, what Apple did was to wire their half-baked NeXT-inherited GUI on top of it and it flied. I'm not even going to comment on the abomination called ObjectiveC, but matter of fact - the underlying OS workings were done in a brilliant way, WHICH, more than everything else enabled all the glitter tossed over the UI that you guys love so much. Like, there's a reason for game engines being written in C++ and not Python, right? Still a programming language though... Sure lot of people adore what Sir Jony Ive did to the overall look and packaging of these products, and for a reason. But what truly distinguishes all these Mac products is what they can get out the hardware. Sorry, but win3.11 did not work well on a 128kb RAM device. I've followed everything MS released since DOS 3.30 and witnessed firsthand the evolution of Linux and many of the distros. Nothing comes close to what Apple could do and is still doing with their hardware/software. No matter if you like Tim Cook (me personally - not) or Steve Jobs (very inspiring guy). One of the reasons MacOS could draw attention from developers, who now form very important part of the user-base, is the fact they have a Unix-like thing at their disposal, and a very fast unix-like thing with some sort of a not-so-disgusting UI (wait for MacOS 26 though). Nobody cares about darn window shadows, edges, or the unreasonable animation effects that we'd be turning off sooner or later.
ZenoArrow 10mo ago
I wish the N950 was fully released, there were some produced but I don't think it was commercially available. It was the true successor to the N900, it would have used the N9 software but unlike the N9 it also had a physical keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
- cvak 10mo ago
  yeah I scooped n950 on some online marketplace for very cheap since it was bricked, fixed it and resold it for profit, but what a beauty of a phone, I wish I kept it.
  - pmarreck 10mo ago
    wow dude, a new 950 in the box is a mere $50,000 on eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/154469885901 https://www.ebay.com/itm/154469885901
aa-jv 10mo ago
I was always kind of dissuaded by the chunky, bar of soap nature of the Nokia devices. (But then again, I had a few OpenPandora to play with as well..) I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like device. What a world it was...
BatteryMountain 10mo ago
Same here. I miss my N900 dearly. It was one of my most expensive items at the time, and I enjoyed this device more than the Galaxy S I9000. It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion. It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard). It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances. It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a phone. It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch a movie on it without issues. I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the market today, as at the time it was much better than early Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty in comparison.
jack_tripper 10mo ago
>I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody would use. You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their Linux phone. Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering to Linux phone enthusiasts. Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they did.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  Back then, absolutely. But the long tail of the Internet, which is far more pervasive these days compared to back then, means that such a device could exist. Which arguably it does, with the GPD win max 2, if you install Linux on it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >means that such a device could exist That was never the problem. The problem was how could Nokia stay competitive to Apple and Google when their focus was selling Linux devices aimed power users.
    - uecker 10mo ago
      I owned the N9. This was a phone which was perfectly good also for average users, and it seems it sold very well in the few markets where it was actually sold (sadly no major markets). But when it came to the market, it was already decided that Nokia will kill their own OS development in favor of Windows Phone, which then flopped spectacularly. A decision which many people called out for being stupid before the consequences had fully unfolded.
atmosx 10mo ago
> I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. ... while you were on the movies? That's "Mr Robot" level, kudos!
TimByte 10mo ago
It wasn't just a phone, it was a little pocket computer that assumed you were allowed to solve your own problems
burnte 10mo ago
To me it was also a huge disappointment. I had the N810 and it was amazing, I still have it. I wish I could get a new board for it. But the N900 was all cheap plastic, no metal like the 810, the magnets fell out all the time, the software was janky, and several promised features never arrived. It could have been awesome, but Nokia had already been distracted in their 5 device plan that the N900 was part of. We never got the follow up and Maemo was abandoned.
nico 10mo ago
Amazing! One time I did something similar. Went to see a movie that was dubbed in Spanish, so I downloaded the movie in English and extracted the audio ahead of time, then I played it on my phone wearing headphones while watching the movie (had to pause/play to adjust timing a few times in the beginning, but after that it was great)

xyzzy123 10mo ago

Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.

mikestorrent 10mo ago
So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be. I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
- eru 10mo ago
  > I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
  - mikestorrent 10mo ago
    If nobody actually sees an AI saying a bad word, is it saying it?

girvo 10mo ago

Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live

Sharlin 10mo ago
It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.
- ITniggah 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - girvo 10mo ago
    N9, not the N900! Meego Harmattan was so much nicer for day to day usage
- carlosjobim 10mo ago
  Not directed at you, but what kind of person would [flag] and [dead] the other reply to your comment? Talk about not having a life! As for the N9, it still has the most modern and beautiful GUI of any smart device, 15 years after being discontinued. It will take at least 15 more years for iOS or Android to reach that level, if ever. The physical design was also very nice and refined. For those who don't believe me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY
  - pessimizer 10mo ago
    I always thought that flagging would get the comment put into a review queue (one that would put even your ability to flag at risk), but it seems that mass flagging gets you an automated flagkill of late. People can get flagkilled for not sufficiently loving particular products or for not being orthorexic enough. As for the N900, I just wanted one or two more hardware iterations (the design flaws were annoying, and a couple mentioned in the OP.) The N9 looked great, but I couldn't get over the loss of the keyboard (although of course that was our dictated future.) The Meego transition seemed unnecessary and annoying (not the UI changes, but everything else), especially the move to rpms from debs. They were just hostile to Debian mainline for some reason; if they had been less hostile, their work would have survived without a break even after Elop intentionally tanked the company. That proprietary moat is just irresistible. iOS and Android literally grabbed the designers of Maemo/Meego and WebOS to update their horrible UIs. Back then, they were still even refusing to multitask. Android copied WebOS almost exactly.

testfrequency 10mo ago

My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien monologue scenes. It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.

theshrike79 10mo ago

The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

Tor3 10mo ago

My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well. As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.

fragmede 10mo ago
Have you seen the GPD pocket 4? There's a 4G option, but unfortunately not one for 5G (yet?) https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2 https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2

larodi 10mo ago

It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly. But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps. The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
The underlying OS makes no difference. BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix. What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too. Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on. Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
- larodi 10mo ago
  Good design of the packaging has nothing to do with underlying OS, unless say it overheats a lot. TBH, the N900 had a fair design, I've used one, not talking from a bystander view, and it was good indeed. Save for the keyboard that perhaps costs 30% the device in order to be where it was (sliding and all). But also, the Nokia Nx's were slow as hell compared to iOS. > The underlying OS makes no difference. perhaps you've never experienced the bliss after setting up a BSD that just works 10 years after... and have never experienced the incredibly stable and snappy multiprocessing this miracle of a kernel (and OS) exhibits for decades now. Let me tell you something - 20 years ago Linux was slow and unstasble as shit, and even slower on embedded. On the other hand FreeBSD and other BSD-derivates were super stable, but took more effort to setup and work with. They did not have the UI though, what Apple did was to wire their half-baked NeXT-inherited GUI on top of it and it flied. I'm not even going to comment on the abomination called ObjectiveC, but matter of fact - the underlying OS workings were done in a brilliant way, WHICH, more than everything else enabled all the glitter tossed over the UI that you guys love so much. Like, there's a reason for game engines being written in C++ and not Python, right? Still a programming language though... Sure lot of people adore what Sir Jony Ive did to the overall look and packaging of these products, and for a reason. But what truly distinguishes all these Mac products is what they can get out the hardware. Sorry, but win3.11 did not work well on a 128kb RAM device. I've followed everything MS released since DOS 3.30 and witnessed firsthand the evolution of Linux and many of the distros. Nothing comes close to what Apple could do and is still doing with their hardware/software. No matter if you like Tim Cook (me personally - not) or Steve Jobs (very inspiring guy). One of the reasons MacOS could draw attention from developers, who now form very important part of the user-base, is the fact they have a Unix-like thing at their disposal, and a very fast unix-like thing with some sort of a not-so-disgusting UI (wait for MacOS 26 though). Nobody cares about darn window shadows, edges, or the unreasonable animation effects that we'd be turning off sooner or later.

ZenoArrow 10mo ago

I wish the N950 was fully released, there were some produced but I don't think it was commercially available. It was the true successor to the N900, it would have used the N9 software but unlike the N9 it also had a physical keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

cvak 10mo ago
yeah I scooped n950 on some online marketplace for very cheap since it was bricked, fixed it and resold it for profit, but what a beauty of a phone, I wish I kept it.
- pmarreck 10mo ago
  wow dude, a new 950 in the box is a mere $50,000 on eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/154469885901 https://www.ebay.com/itm/154469885901

aa-jv 10mo ago

I was always kind of dissuaded by the chunky, bar of soap nature of the Nokia devices. (But then again, I had a few OpenPandora to play with as well..) I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like device. What a world it was...

BatteryMountain 10mo ago

Same here. I miss my N900 dearly. It was one of my most expensive items at the time, and I enjoyed this device more than the Galaxy S I9000. It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion. It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard). It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances. It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a phone. It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch a movie on it without issues. I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the market today, as at the time it was much better than early Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty in comparison.

jack_tripper 10mo ago

>I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody would use. You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their Linux phone. Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering to Linux phone enthusiasts. Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they did.

fragmede 10mo ago
Back then, absolutely. But the long tail of the Internet, which is far more pervasive these days compared to back then, means that such a device could exist. Which arguably it does, with the GPD win max 2, if you install Linux on it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >means that such a device could exist That was never the problem. The problem was how could Nokia stay competitive to Apple and Google when their focus was selling Linux devices aimed power users.
  - uecker 10mo ago
    I owned the N9. This was a phone which was perfectly good also for average users, and it seems it sold very well in the few markets where it was actually sold (sadly no major markets). But when it came to the market, it was already decided that Nokia will kill their own OS development in favor of Windows Phone, which then flopped spectacularly. A decision which many people called out for being stupid before the consequences had fully unfolded.

atmosx 10mo ago

TimByte 10mo ago

It wasn't just a phone, it was a little pocket computer that assumed you were allowed to solve your own problems

burnte 10mo ago

To me it was also a huge disappointment. I had the N810 and it was amazing, I still have it. I wish I could get a new board for it. But the N900 was all cheap plastic, no metal like the 810, the magnets fell out all the time, the software was janky, and several promised features never arrived. It could have been awesome, but Nokia had already been distracted in their 5 device plan that the N900 was part of. We never got the follow up and Maemo was abandoned.

nico 10mo ago

Amazing! One time I did something similar. Went to see a movie that was dubbed in Spanish, so I downloaded the movie in English and extracted the audio ahead of time, then I played it on my phone wearing headphones while watching the movie (had to pause/play to adjust timing a few times in the beginning, but after that it was great)