Nokia N900 Necromancy

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.

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

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

It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.

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.

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?

Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water. It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband – I'd rather just connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the complications of having a whole extra computer in there.

Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?

Have you seen the Jolla preorder? It was on hn a few days ago. That is the spiritual successor of the N9XX line.

https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder

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

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.

It's excciting, but I saw a review of a pre-release c2 on youtube [0] the other day, and it seemed extremely slow in the interactions. Otherwise, it seems like a cool device.

[0] https://youtu.be/5titW5dclwg

I loved my N9. But i'm somewhat hesitant on preordering that one. I need wireless charging.. And i still dont really get if Android-apps actually work or not, i.e. swedish Bank-Id/Swish etc.

The C2 is a different device than the new one linked above, which was way more affordable (~250 Euro) with a 4G Unisoc SoC.

> 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?

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.

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

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"?

I'd actually prefer one running a normal Linux. It's a travesty that certain things in daily life require Android or iOS, and that's a fight I'll keep fighting, but the idea of a tiny Linux laptop in my pocket is just so tempting.

Promising! Thanks!

This is absolutely doable by a niche company. The problem is that you need to run this as a business. What plagues every free/open/libre project is that they're not run as a business; so they get distracted in all different directions trying to cater to ideals about free/libre licensing and so on, and end up missing the big picture.

You need to operate this as a business first, with the freedom part being a nice bonus. Nobody cares how free your thing is if it's dead on arrival and gets beaten by an entry-level smartphone.

Make a competitive product. Nowadays that could very well just mean Android with manufacturer-sanctioned root access and preinstalled terminal & X/wayland server for those who want to run desktop apps.

The Jolla phone someone linked below actually looks like a decent product. The Android app support means it's actually usable in the modern world, and the specs look competitive.

I don't see any keyboard or stylus in that Jolla.

For me that is not even in the same league than the N900.

There is the Gemini PDA from 2018 which has a physical keyboard. I heard it was mostly a disappointment.

There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.

All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego from Nokia.

A bigger mistake was to not give the N770, N800, etc. phone capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn't even consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS. They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.

Maybe you're right. But at the same time I feel (based on nothing) that even the performance of an entry-level Android phone, coupled with libre hardware and software, and a tiny little keyboard like the N900's, running an ordinary Linux distro, actually would find a market. A small market made up of us weirdos who find this HN thread interesting.

But then again, experience shows I'm wrong.

A bit on the larger size, but this already exists: https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket

N9, not the N900! Meego Harmattan was so much nicer for day to day usage

I haven't, and I don't need one, but I'm going to buy one anyway (though its likely not allowed on Australia networks sigh)

Good god no.

The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.

Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.

Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.

tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.

Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.

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...

Sure i can join you on the barricade, but i still want to function in a society :(