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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

#71

Post by seego »

flukus wrote: post #52
toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

> He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty From what I remember this was because they'd spent so much time and effort building up the maemo (or meeGo or whatever) and burned up so much goodwill with the switch to Qt. When the burning platform memo came out they'd literally just burned another platform, regardless of technical merit the timing for mov…

Imho the problem was exactly the opposite. Investing too much in the old symbian platform and not commiting to maemo.

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

#72

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

I was also pretty enthusiastic about the platform. Nokia big missed opportunity. My impression was that there was a brief window in history where they could've set themselves up as a rival to iOS and Android.

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

#73

Post by originalvichy »

subspaceman wrote: post #48

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…

I got it as a graduation gift and it steered me into this field due to giving me a real contact with Unix/Linux and tinkering. I had tried Linux desktop but as a young gamer the moment browsing the web for the day was done, it was time to fire up Windows and play.

The N900 was different. I didn't understand everything I was doing, but installing deb's, overclocking a CPU, installing Android v2.x, installing emulators, browsing forums for more tinkering (I could go on) was the thing that made me love computers more.

Last but not least, it had a killer feature any fresh 18-year-old with friends that had cars loved back then: FM transmitter!! Back when AUX inputs were still a rarity and bluetooth was pairing... pairing... pairing... just pressing a button and tuning to a channel to get crystal clear audio was AMAZING. That and the IR blaster made for some nice party tricks.

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

#74

Post by lenkite »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

If the Nokia board had not hired Elop or had fired him in time, Maemo would have been a third mobile platform alternative today - one likely far more open than Android.

Elop was a truly successful Nokia saboteur. An illustrative case study of how a single CEO can destroy a company for his self-profit and go out laughing with no legal repercussions.

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

#75

Post by ebfe1 »

Had my N900 when it first came out and to this day it is still my most favourite device! I kept it for a long time as 2nd device, I had pwnphone on it for a ages and showed off to friends how i could Deauth all their wifi devices, run kismet, even crack WEP, turn off their TV with tvbgone app using infrared...

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

#76

Post by markb139 »

whereistimbo wrote: post #68
inglor_cz wrote: post #66

I was a Symbian developer at that time. The fate of N900 is a grim reminder that engineering brilliance will still lose out to managerial incompetence. Seriously, the device was just so attractive both for users and programmers. If Nokia were able to stay the course, they could pull off a bestseller. Their nosedive into the ground under Stephen Elop is a stuff of dark legends.

Not really. Even before Elop, there were multiple layer of management and the culture of CMA (Cover My Arse) was so strong, as I heard from other Nokia ex-employees. Not to mention people from Symbian Inc wasn't good people according to the book about rise and fall of Symbian.

It's interesting how devices have gone. Nokia, when they were focused, were making devices smaller, cheaper and with improved battery life. Now we get these giant devices that need re-charging daily and cost >£1000

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

#77

Post by jbj »

serf wrote: post #18
gtk40 wrote: post #13

I had a Nokia N800 "Internet Tablet" and loved that device. Android was a huge downgrade compared to what you could do with that in every way except interface, and the interface wasn't too bad.

I had an N800 and and N900 afterwards. I used the N800 until the battery eventually failed. It was amazingly liberating, as a 'computer person', to have a truly hand-held computer; all my friends and family thought it was a stupid toy with a hard-to-understand interface -- but they liked drawing on it.

I had an N800 and found it so amazing, 2 sd card slots, pop out camera that could rotate, and a useful kickstand. I recently found the Planet Computers devices and tried their first version out, it is conceptually a bit similar to the fxtec mentioned in the blog post.

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

#78

Post by MayeulC »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #54
glsdfgkjsklfj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from my experience porting cyanogenMOD from android phones that only received 2.3 officially all the way up to 4+, you are likely running the binary kernel drivers as binary blobs for 2.6 and some kid in a forum either flipped bits at random while following a asm tutorial or wrapped it in a syscall shell that emulates an old kernel to the driver. or maybe the n900 had less esoteric peripherals than android phones. I…

Your experience isn't very relevant to N900 then. It's a proper GNU/Linux device, the only closed driver blob was for the GPU.

Another PowerVR GPU for those that wonder. They quite notoriously don't have any open-source drivers.

There is a lot of information on the net why that's not the case, from the GPU architecture to source leaks. One could possibly make a shim to load older proprietary kernel modules, but it's hardly worth it: PowerVR GPUs don't seem to be used much nowadays, in contrast with Mali GPUs. And PowerVR GPUs seem to require quite different drivers depending on IP customization.

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

#79

Post by pjmlp »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

From the inside that is how pretty much we went through it.

The community was already getting tired of the multiple Symbian reboots (just IDEs there were three of them), then came PIPS and Qt, while it seemed like a strecht everyone was kind of still on boat.

However then the whole Linux vs Symbian started to gain steam, Symbian went open source, and finally the burning platforms memo happenend.

Not many happy faces at Espoo during that week, and even more unhappy devs asked to throw everything away and jump into .NET, when the Nokia community had a long tradition of Java and C++ development stacks.

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

#80

Post by CTOSian »

noipv4 wrote: post #31
u801e wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a spring mechanism that pushes it out. It worked by pressing in to lock it and then pressing in again to unlock it. The cover is recessed relative to the case, so it would be a bit difficult to secure it with tape unfortunately.

I had to end up using a small drop of superglue.

superglue is a no go there... I repair such things using tamper evident seal (those red/blue varnish for tamper proof screws etc)
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