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.

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

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

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