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The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

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Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#41

Post by seba_dos1 »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #5

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990…

Well, there must have been more to it than just "first touchscreen phones" - Openmoko Neo1973 was announced shortly before the iPhone was revealed and it was a touchscreen-only phone already, delivered in 2007.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#42

Post by seba_dos1 »

bzzzt wrote: post #3
wartron wrote: post #2

Before this was a "feature phone" the Nokia 9000, i loved it. When this was out I was using the OG Motorola Droid. I wanted one of these but they were not available on my carrier so I stayed on the Droid line. The hot-dog slide keyboard was amazing. I had full terminal control from these. Nowadays I actually still rock a 2017 iphone SE; dimensions wise I don't want anything bigger in width or height, but i would glad…

I used an N900 for a few years (got one with the early adopter discount when it was released). While the keyboard was miles ahead of all the on-screen stuff at the time I don't think I want to go back to that keyboard from a current decent touch-screen phone. The keys were a bit too small for fast typing...

The key size is alright, I'm able to type on it much faster than on a touchscreen - provided that I don't need to use anything else than regular letters. The most painful thing on that keyboard is lack of 4th row of keys.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#43

Post by seba_dos1 »

drudu wrote: post #11
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #7

I loved the Nokia N900's design, that hardware keyboard that made it so easy to do remote system administration over SSH, or keep doing everything that I want to do in Emacs just like on my laptop or desktop computers. Also like all Nokia phones of the time, it was nearly indestructible and could easily survive drops that would destroy a modern smartphone’s screen or casing. However, in retrospect not all was rosy. A…

I had one of these and your note of "a cellular modem connected directly to main memory" makes me laugh. I didn't know that until now but I think that clears up why phone calls could crash the phone in some circumstances. Like you said it was a fantastic little linux terminal - great for SSH and it was certainly fun and novel to have a linux CLI on my cell phone.

> I didn't know that

That's good, because that isn't true. Rapuyama has its own 128MB of DRAM on the N900.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#44

Post by seba_dos1 »

pessimizer wrote: post #28

> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.

Maybe I wouldn't say "every way" (it doesn't age very well, several of my N900s have developed issues with their digitizers by now), but I do agree that it's superior. Much more accurate and pleasant to use than today's touchscreens; and way less prone to accidental touches. I have switched to a Librem 5 now, but I miss the N900's resistive screen.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#45

Post by seba_dos1 »

shmerl wrote: post #36

I still hope some viable and fully open Linux option will emerge that's not Android. And have good quality devices with that. Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused. I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland compositor and a normal Linux stack.

(disclosure: I work for Purism)

That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :)

There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include software development.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#46

Post by shmerl »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #45
shmerl wrote: post #36

I still hope some viable and fully open Linux option will emerge that's not Android. And have good quality devices with that. Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused. I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland compositor and a normal Linux stack.

(disclosure: I work for Purism) That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :) There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include software development.

That's a very good development for sure. I hope the hardware will be able to progress, since SoC choices for further improvements are very limited and the likes of Qualcomm are DOA.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#47

Post by neilv »

toyg wrote: post #38
neilv wrote: post #27

There's a pmOS effort to make the N900 hardware usable with modern kernel: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900) There was also a project to replace the hardware: https://neo900.org/ When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the once-public open source an…

> a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And then they pi…

Interesting. I wasn't involved at the time, and, when I went trying to reconstruct the open source afterwards, I suspected the ill-fated Microsoft deal might've had something to do with it. But sounds like there were problems before then.

A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our collective understanding of this improved even within the last few years (e.g., community development processes like Rust's).

(Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might also be forgetting things that people used to know -- repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way, and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier community foresee and avoid at the time.)

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#48

Post by subspaceman »

I was so excited about the N900 when it was announced - a linux machine in my pocket! I couldn't justify the price, being freshly out of school though. Nokia advertised a competition asking the public how they would "hack" the device to make something cool. I submitted a proposal to make a bike dashboard - it sounds so basic now, but I wanted a simple way to track my ride and proposed fun little additions like using the ambient light sensor to turn on an external headlight, a horn, etc.

They picked my proposal along with a couple others and gave us some budget to buy hardware and components, and about 3 or 4 weeks to complete the project. It was my first time soldering, first time using an Arduino, and I remember being so stressed out about whether or not it would work.

It all came together in the end and looking back with hindsight now, I really owe a lot to that competition and the phone that let me pretty quickly write python apps on it :) Good times.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#49

Post by gymnodemi »

u801e wrote: post #9
finchisko wrote: post #4

Still have this little linux phone. It missed compass hw, so map experience was not great and also resistive display was inferior to iPhone, but still loved it. It's bad Nokia didn't manage it create viable platform, but rather switched to Windows phones and also died there with broken teeth.

They had released the N9 and there was a developer only N950. I'm still using my N9 even today though the lock mechanism on the SIM holder no longer works.

Wow, I had to abandon my N9 after all of my fixes including buying a new SIM holder failed. I still have my N9 and my N900. I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer. It easily beat all of the Android phones at that time. I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired and the SIM holder wasn't horked.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#50

Post by wombatmobile »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #5

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990…

> Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way

They were tripped up by their own success as the 800 lb gorilla of dumb phones that sold in the hundreds of millions.

Nokia had a seperate department for “renewing the company through innovation”. It was an internal incubator which reported directly to the CEO. It could scout for tech, and develop prototype product products.

The problems started at the point where a new product was ready to leave the incubator. It had to be “sold” to an existing business unit in a suitable division.

The hurdle was that pre-2007 Nokia divisions were raking in billions selling mature tech in enormous volumes through existing channels.

There was no room and few candidates to champion anything new which required nurturing, development, ancillory technology and marketplaces, or, heaven forbid, new business models, starting from a revenue base of $0.00.

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