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Nokia N900 Necromancy

(yaky.dev)
328 points yaky | 3 comments | 12 Dec 25 00:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.609s | source
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sollewitt ◴[12 Dec 25 04:38 UTC] No.46240916[source]▶
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.

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girvo ◴[12 Dec 25 06:00 UTC] No.46241284[source]▶
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
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gspr ◴[12 Dec 25 07:14 UTC] No.46241648[source]▶
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?

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1. Nextgrid ◴[12 Dec 25 09:49 UTC] No.46242516[source]▶
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.

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2. gspr ◴[12 Dec 25 10:57 UTC] No.46242917[source]▶
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.

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3. Nextgrid ◴[12 Dec 25 11:05 UTC] No.46242962[source]▶
A bit on the larger size, but this already exists: https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket