71–80 of 276 posts
Sadly, my recurring problem is that as a Verizon customer, I have exactly zero options outside the big two and an obsolete version of the third. (I'm carrying a Lumia 929, presently.) Nobody bothers developing third party OS offerings that work on Verizon networks.
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Nokia went under, and the world outside of tech cares more about the shiny than the capabilities.
Actually, Nokia - under Elop's leadership - decided to go to Windows Phone platform for mobile phones, and discontinue Maemo. That WP thing didn't go so well. However Nokia as a company did not go under; it is still very much there, particularly in telecom infra business.
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You are not alone, I have two good friends that still have theirs too, and nothing will ever be good enough for them again. That phone spoiled them, and is the direction they wish phones went. Alas, they have gone the way of the masses instead, but you know if someone like a OnePlus came out with a modern powered phone, with a big battery (phone size doesn't matter to us), a physical keyboard, dual sim, expandable me…
Have you looked into sailfish? No physical keyboard, AFAICT, but it's based on the successor to Maemo. Also, look into the neo900 project and Pyra. Neo900 is trying to upgrade the n900, and Pyra is the successor to Pandora, which is a pocket computer in a semi-similar vein to the old nokias. Neither is finished, but they're worth a look.
Interface seems gratuitously large except the status bar and clock and whatnot. In all the shots of the home screen (?) the on-screen navigation buttons seem to cover the labels of the app icons... sometimes. The "Muon" app has a smaller icon so the label sits higher... looks not so great. However, it seems they're trying to appeal to the more Libre folks - anti-all-current-smartphone-OS-vendors and their watchful ey…
I like this announcement and still root for any alternative phone platform. The thing is - which device would I buy? Plasma Mobile supports the Nexus 5 and (maybe) the OnePlus One right now. CopperheadOS doesn't support either of those. I was unable to get a reliable source for supported devices for Ubuntu Phone (best I found was [1], not even sure if that's related) and so far I don't believe that the supported devi…
Copperhead is just a liberated Android for the most part, it just replaces Replicant.
Since Jolla develops sailfishOS, and the OS itself is mostly proprietary, it should be no surprise there isn't a hobbyist community supporting it on Android phones.
Plasma Mobile and Firefox OS were both in a class that could feasibly eventually sell phones with it stock. Its the same problem as the desktop Linux ecosystem - as long as you have to actually install the OS yourself, the market is nonexistent compared to the preinstalled market. You need units in stores in peoples faces before you can start making meaningful inroads into market adoption.
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I clung to my N900 for so long. I got it at launch in fall 2009, and I used it as my daily driver until early 2014, when I finally buckled and got a Nexus 5. By that point, my N900 was barely usable, but I was really dragging my feet on a replacement because I knew that any other OS would be a step backwards.
That's exactly what I got mine, and exactly when I retired mine because I didn't want it to flat out stop working. The USB port died and the SD card never worked to begin with. Once the circuitry for the wifi becomes inoperational (like what happened with my tmobile g1), then I consider the phone officially dead...
On top of that, over the years, the kickstand broke, the screen got scratched badly, my belt clip broke in multiple places, the SIM slot became really finicky, and even the plastic around the keyboard was starting to come out.
And a lot of the problem was performance: a 600 MHz OMAP3 was great in 2009, but by 2014 it was just too slow to handle modern websites, and the browser based on Firefox 3.5 (maybe 3.6?) couldn't even handle some newer websites. And to be honest, the RAM was low even for its time... only 256 MB, operated as a unionfs with the rootfs, plus some of the (very, very slow) eMMC was formatted as swap. Over time, most apps stopped working: I remember using Facebrick to access Facebook for a while, and it was nice, but eventually the author stopped updating it, and Facebook changed their API, so no more Facebrick. It got to the point where I'd only use the browser, terminal, camera, and dialer, because that's all that was useful.
About a year after getting my Nexus 5, I booted up my N900 to get some photos off it, and I found I had difficulty emailing them to myself because Gmail had changed their API and flagged my N900's connection attempts because they used the old API that was deprecated for security reasons. None of the emails went through, and when I got back to my desktop, Google took me to a page telling me it thought my account had been compromised.
Just like desktop KDE, the UI doesn't appeal to me. I find it too flashy and kind of "in your face". My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9. That device was mind blowing and that OS. Amazing. It had such a simple, yet useful UI. Multi-tasking was better than what even Android has now. I hope Jolla doesn't die like that and we see a lot more devices come out running Sailfish.
To be fair though, Nokia (and its Meego department) had close relationships with the KDE developer community due to Qt and if I recall correctly, even chose some libraries from KDE applications (like KOffice/Calligra) to use in their mobile apps.
Earlier versions of Maemo had been using GTK.
The intro of the Qt based Maemo 5 on the N900 effectively drove a wedge into the community, in particular as Nokia gave away N900s at the unveiling.
At the same time Nokia and Intel could not agree on the structure of Meego, with Intel first going deb (same as Maemo) but then switching to rpm with Moblin2.
In the end the whole mess was handed over to the Linux Foundation as both parties lost interest (Intel started Moblin in large part to light a fire under Microsoft to support mobile Atom).
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You are not alone, I have two good friends that still have theirs too, and nothing will ever be good enough for them again. That phone spoiled them, and is the direction they wish phones went. Alas, they have gone the way of the masses instead, but you know if someone like a OnePlus came out with a modern powered phone, with a big battery (phone size doesn't matter to us), a physical keyboard, dual sim, expandable me…
Have you looked into sailfish? No physical keyboard, AFAICT, but it's based on the successor to Maemo. Also, look into the neo900 project and Pyra. Neo900 is trying to upgrade the n900, and Pyra is the successor to Pandora, which is a pocket computer in a semi-similar vein to the old nokias. Neither is finished, but they're worth a look.
The neo900 makes me sad, because it's basically my ideal phone, but the price is just too much for me. I know it's not their fault, the low production quantities will do that, but still. It's an updated n900, with a fully FOSS stack and an isolated baseband to boot... awesome.
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Is meego like maemo? I used to have a Nokia n900, and that thing was the greatest phone I ever had! It's amazing at multitasking, and it feels like having an actual desktop in your pocket.
Meego was a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, so yes. Sailfish is the modern descendant.
Sailfish is based of Mer, A community reimplementation of Maemo without the proprietary Nokia bits (power management being a key part), that was started before the merger. But adopted various Meego elements afterwards.
BTW, it was the Sailfish IRC channel that spawn the supposed Poettering death threat. It was actually a bad joke about using kickstarter to fund an assassin after the Sailfish teams latest late night session of fixing breakages that a updated systemd caused. yes, Sailfish use systemd. And they were also a early adopter, if not instigator, of Wayland.
But you don't want to clearly tell us who it is?