Nokia N900 Necromancy

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.

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"?

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.

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.