7 ms·

It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? I'm

It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? I'm genuinely curious, I don't know much about the N900.

INTPenis 13y ago
Both me and my brother had one when it came out and I can honestly say it's the shittiest phone I've had. But this is a matter of ideology.
- simias 13y ago
  Care to develop why it was shitty?
  - zokier 13y ago
    Well it was not without its faults; the software was generally just buggy and laggy, battery life was quite poor, device was bulky and heavy, the resistive screen was bit iffy at times, there weren't that huge library of notable apps, etc. And this is coming from someone with fond memories of N900.
  - mafuyu 13y ago
    The N900 wasn't all that great as a phone. The OS was buggy and you had to go through hoops to do basic things like send MMS pictures. It wasn't the best phone, but it was an amazing pocket computer at the time. You could load a variety of operating systems and tinker around with it and it had a hardware keyboard.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    I never owned one, but I did have a couple of friends that let me use theirs. The touchscreen was a bit dodgy and the battery life was suspect - but IMO those are minor complaints compared to the main, insurmountable problem: the UI was extremely slow. Like, tap-the-screne-wait-multiple-seconds slow. Even before the revelation of swipe gesture and smooth 60fps animations on iPhone, it was slow by the standards of its own era. I remember trying to use the phone to type out a quick text and being infuriated. Response time between keypress and UI update was atrocious, and even closing a window took well over a second, if not multiple seconds. It may have been FOSS-friendly, but it wasn't really a good software stack otherwise.
    - Gravityloss 13y ago
      Taking calls with the N900 was especially hilarious. The phone was ringing but it sometimes took many seconds for the phone app to appear on the screen. When you took the ringing phone from the pocket and pressed the green receiver icon to accept the call, it just before your finger hit the screen managed to rotate the screen and of course the red receiver decline icon was there in the other screen orientation. That's some ingenious design easter egg and symptomatic of how unfinished this stuff was. Also the Busybox default shell was next to useless. The charging microusb port also always broke. How many cents did they save per phone by using a substandard part? The keyboard was very good though. N9 was so much better than N900. The graphics and the fonts looked so clean, and the swipe UI was just pure genius. You could see it had some serious thought put into it. Android UI is a mess compared to that. It's very slow to switch between apps and tasks in Android. If only N9 had not been so excruciatingly slow. It didn't help that multitasking was so easy. I guess such incoherent products are a sign of a malfunctioning organization.
  - INTPenis 13y ago
    Well you already got your answers before I had a chance to, but in short it was a terrible phone and a big step for FOSS and portable hacking devices.
zokier 13y ago
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? N900 had: - HW keyboard - Pixel-accurate touchscreen (with stylus) - Desktop-ish hacker/FOSS friendly Linux OS Essentially N900 was the embodiment of the dreams of what Nokia could have been if it weren't for EVIL Elop and MS ruining everything, and that is why the device has small cult following. There has been occasional HW keyboard equipped Android devices since, but they have usually been of limited availability, and while Meego lives on as Mer (and the rest of the family) it afaik is not really usable as daily driver (yet). And Mer has been adapted to fairly limited number of devices, none which afaik have HW keyboards (besides N9x0).
- moystard 13y ago
  I don't think the N900 was the embodiment of the dream of what Nokia could have been without Elop, the N9/N950 were. Both were beautifully designed phones, with a unique and powerful operating system: swipe-based interaction, social feed screen, multitask, beautiful applications, good development environment (Qt).. This was the direction Nokia should have gone toward.. Edit: typos.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    You have to realize the timeframe that N900 was released: 2009. Back then, it was way ahead of most other smartphones (including iPhone), and had multitasking to boot. The resolution was touted as "better than DVD". It had a commandline out of the box, and not some watered down, misplace all the system files version either. It was basically Debian on a phone, with smooth, beautiful graphics, a decent package management system, and tons of possibilities (Rovio ported Angry Birds to it!). Oh, and did I mention it also had Qt, including Python QT, with IDE options (including emacs) on the phone? Sure, the N9 was pretty, but it had no hardware keyboard, and the N950 doesn't count as you still can't easily get one (you had to be an active Maemo developer to get one).
    - wmf 13y ago
      I bought a N900 and it may have been ahead of the iPhone in tech specs but it was way behind in the feel of day-to-day usage. True multitasking could drain the N900's battery in an hour even if the phone was idle. Because the stylus was included many apps required it, so a lot of time was wasted unholstering the stylus. The resistive single-touch screen doesn't support gestures. Maemo didn't support portrait orientation for one-handed usage.
leokun 13y ago
> It looks thick. It does. It looks like it's the phone equivalent of a bathtub. With the cover closed, it appears it will be a brick. I think that box protrusion around the headset jack input on the side is thicker than some of the more recent smartphones. You would really have to like OpenMoko to carry around a giant smartphone with no apps and no support with probably an old browser. I also imagine the antenna will be poor and the battery life awful and the UI stuttering.
- zokier 13y ago
  Yeah, it was a brick. I remember that my old semi-smartphone (well, I guess symbians would be classified as featurephones these days) would fit entirely underneath the screen when slid open edit: I guess this answers the question quite nicely: http://i.imgur.com/CNxmvfB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CNxmvfB.jpg
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- CountHackulus 13y ago
  Battery life was excellent on the N900 actually, I could go an entire weekend of good use without charging. My Nexus 4... not so much.
sinkasapa 13y ago
> It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. There is no argument for feelings but is there really any practical advantage to thinness, past a certain obvious point when it allows something to fit in one's pocket? It isn't blue, soft or delicious either. :-)
drbawb 13y ago
What's with the aversion to thickness? It allows for bigger batteries, hardware keyboards, additional connectors & storage, etc. --- I can't speak for everyone: but the pockets in my wardrobe had no problem accommodating feature-phones from pre-2007. What my pants and shirt pockets can't accommodate are 4.5"+ 1080p displays, regardless of how thin they are. I will gladly buy a bulkier phone if they make good use of the extra space.
- Nomez 13y ago
  A device that big might make me want to put it on my belt. But, alas, I'm not Batman so I won't do that.
losvedir 13y ago
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? The idea of it was great but the phone itself was pretty frustrating. The idea is that it was a little bitty linux tablet, with something of an open source community behind it, that could also make phone calls. I explained some of my thoughts in this arstechnica thread[0] from 4 years ago. But the reality once I got the phone was it was just slow and frustrating to use. Aspects of it were great (it multitasked the best of all the phones of its day), but over time it's glitchyness (hanging up on calls instead of answering them, because the buttons jumped around), and the lack of multi touch brought me down. I still have my N900 in a box somewhere. If anyone in the Boston area wants it, ping me (email address on my profile here) and I'd be happy to give it to you. [0] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49987 http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49987

INTPenis 13y ago

Both me and my brother had one when it came out and I can honestly say it's the shittiest phone I've had. But this is a matter of ideology.

simias 13y ago
Care to develop why it was shitty?
- zokier 13y ago
  Well it was not without its faults; the software was generally just buggy and laggy, battery life was quite poor, device was bulky and heavy, the resistive screen was bit iffy at times, there weren't that huge library of notable apps, etc. And this is coming from someone with fond memories of N900.
- mafuyu 13y ago
  The N900 wasn't all that great as a phone. The OS was buggy and you had to go through hoops to do basic things like send MMS pictures. It wasn't the best phone, but it was an amazing pocket computer at the time. You could load a variety of operating systems and tinker around with it and it had a hardware keyboard.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  I never owned one, but I did have a couple of friends that let me use theirs. The touchscreen was a bit dodgy and the battery life was suspect - but IMO those are minor complaints compared to the main, insurmountable problem: the UI was extremely slow. Like, tap-the-screne-wait-multiple-seconds slow. Even before the revelation of swipe gesture and smooth 60fps animations on iPhone, it was slow by the standards of its own era. I remember trying to use the phone to type out a quick text and being infuriated. Response time between keypress and UI update was atrocious, and even closing a window took well over a second, if not multiple seconds. It may have been FOSS-friendly, but it wasn't really a good software stack otherwise.
  - Gravityloss 13y ago
    Taking calls with the N900 was especially hilarious. The phone was ringing but it sometimes took many seconds for the phone app to appear on the screen. When you took the ringing phone from the pocket and pressed the green receiver icon to accept the call, it just before your finger hit the screen managed to rotate the screen and of course the red receiver decline icon was there in the other screen orientation. That's some ingenious design easter egg and symptomatic of how unfinished this stuff was. Also the Busybox default shell was next to useless. The charging microusb port also always broke. How many cents did they save per phone by using a substandard part? The keyboard was very good though. N9 was so much better than N900. The graphics and the fonts looked so clean, and the swipe UI was just pure genius. You could see it had some serious thought put into it. Android UI is a mess compared to that. It's very slow to switch between apps and tasks in Android. If only N9 had not been so excruciatingly slow. It didn't help that multitasking was so easy. I guess such incoherent products are a sign of a malfunctioning organization.
- INTPenis 13y ago
  Well you already got your answers before I had a chance to, but in short it was a terrible phone and a big step for FOSS and portable hacking devices.

zokier 13y ago

> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? N900 had: - HW keyboard - Pixel-accurate touchscreen (with stylus) - Desktop-ish hacker/FOSS friendly Linux OS Essentially N900 was the embodiment of the dreams of what Nokia could have been if it weren't for EVIL Elop and MS ruining everything, and that is why the device has small cult following. There has been occasional HW keyboard equipped Android devices since, but they have usually been of limited availability, and while Meego lives on as Mer (and the rest of the family) it afaik is not really usable as daily driver (yet). And Mer has been adapted to fairly limited number of devices, none which afaik have HW keyboards (besides N9x0).

moystard 13y ago
I don't think the N900 was the embodiment of the dream of what Nokia could have been without Elop, the N9/N950 were. Both were beautifully designed phones, with a unique and powerful operating system: swipe-based interaction, social feed screen, multitask, beautiful applications, good development environment (Qt).. This was the direction Nokia should have gone toward.. Edit: typos.
- npsimons 13y ago
  You have to realize the timeframe that N900 was released: 2009. Back then, it was way ahead of most other smartphones (including iPhone), and had multitasking to boot. The resolution was touted as "better than DVD". It had a commandline out of the box, and not some watered down, misplace all the system files version either. It was basically Debian on a phone, with smooth, beautiful graphics, a decent package management system, and tons of possibilities (Rovio ported Angry Birds to it!). Oh, and did I mention it also had Qt, including Python QT, with IDE options (including emacs) on the phone? Sure, the N9 was pretty, but it had no hardware keyboard, and the N950 doesn't count as you still can't easily get one (you had to be an active Maemo developer to get one).
  - wmf 13y ago
    I bought a N900 and it may have been ahead of the iPhone in tech specs but it was way behind in the feel of day-to-day usage. True multitasking could drain the N900's battery in an hour even if the phone was idle. Because the stylus was included many apps required it, so a lot of time was wasted unholstering the stylus. The resistive single-touch screen doesn't support gestures. Maemo didn't support portrait orientation for one-handed usage.

leokun 13y ago

> It looks thick. It does. It looks like it's the phone equivalent of a bathtub. With the cover closed, it appears it will be a brick. I think that box protrusion around the headset jack input on the side is thicker than some of the more recent smartphones. You would really have to like OpenMoko to carry around a giant smartphone with no apps and no support with probably an old browser. I also imagine the antenna will be poor and the battery life awful and the UI stuttering.

zokier 13y ago
Yeah, it was a brick. I remember that my old semi-smartphone (well, I guess symbians would be classified as featurephones these days) would fit entirely underneath the screen when slid open edit: I guess this answers the question quite nicely: http://i.imgur.com/CNxmvfB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CNxmvfB.jpg
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
CountHackulus 13y ago
Battery life was excellent on the N900 actually, I could go an entire weekend of good use without charging. My Nexus 4... not so much.

sinkasapa 13y ago

> It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. There is no argument for feelings but is there really any practical advantage to thinness, past a certain obvious point when it allows something to fit in one's pocket? It isn't blue, soft or delicious either. :-)

drbawb 13y ago

What's with the aversion to thickness? It allows for bigger batteries, hardware keyboards, additional connectors & storage, etc. --- I can't speak for everyone: but the pockets in my wardrobe had no problem accommodating feature-phones from pre-2007. What my pants and shirt pockets can't accommodate are 4.5"+ 1080p displays, regardless of how thin they are. I will gladly buy a bulkier phone if they make good use of the extra space.

Nomez 13y ago
A device that big might make me want to put it on my belt. But, alas, I'm not Batman so I won't do that.

losvedir 13y ago

> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? The idea of it was great but the phone itself was pretty frustrating. The idea is that it was a little bitty linux tablet, with something of an open source community behind it, that could also make phone calls. I explained some of my thoughts in this arstechnica thread[0] from 4 years ago. But the reality once I got the phone was it was just slow and frustrating to use. Aspects of it were great (it multitasked the best of all the phones of its day), but over time it's glitchyness (hanging up on calls instead of answering them, because the buttons jumped around), and the lack of multi touch brought me down. I still have my N900 in a box somewhere. If anyone in the Boston area wants it, ping me (email address on my profile here) and I'd be happy to give it to you. [0] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49987 http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49987