The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

agloeregrets wrote: post #107

jillesvangurp wrote: post #63

I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based b…

It's stunning to me just how many incredible technical efforts Nokia made to just kill. The N9 after this was killer but boom, dead, the Nokia X was okay but weird, Dead, the Lumia, alive, then boom, dead. It's remarkable that Elop was never prosecuted for his actions that clearly were in benefit to his prior employer. It's almost hilarious that modern Nokia HMD makes phones now because I expect the company to random…

Elop was a stooge that executed the master plan created bv the Nokia board together with MS as specified. Blame the decade of incompetence that preceded Elop.

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

#132

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

zelos wrote: post #111

jillesvangurp wrote: post #63

I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based b…

> One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT; That was kind of swings and roundabouts, though. The second version of the Maemo app I worked on ended up being a major rewrite Gtk->Qt thanks to the switch, but Qt was so much better.

Yes, it just meant shipping after Apple and Android had become entrenched in the market. Nokia wasted a good two years doing this. And it was too little too late.

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

#133

Post by opan » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

Black101 wrote: post #112

I wish I could own a phone like this today. Too bad companies are so cheap that they can only produce keyboardless phones with widescreens...

There is the PinePhone, and a keyboard attachment is actively being worked on.

https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/

> PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well – but we’re still waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this month

There are pictures as well.

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

#134

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

butokai wrote: post #89

jillesvangurp wrote: post #63

I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based b…

I would be curious to know more about the several devices that were planned to be on Meego but then shipped with Symbian! I remember seeing Bada phones at the time, but (at least in my country) the "does it run WhatsApp" era was already starting, and the total lack of apps for Bada made it totally unattractive. All said, I am not sure that polishing and marketing would have been enough to save the situation. I didn't…

I know the N8 was at some point earmarked for Meego. But internal politics happened.

That would have been a true flagship phone around 2011 with a 12 megapixel camera, aluminium body and nice touch screen. I had it in Symbian form and it was alright but ultimately meh in terms of software. Essentially all Android phones at that point were a combination of slow, not very premium, and riddled with bugs. This was way before Google figured out how to do software updates properly.

A slick UI, linux, touchscreen, etc. exactly what Nokia needed at that point. But they convinced themselves Symbian was good enough and were corrected by the market that made it very clear that it wasn't even close. Of course crippling the device with not enough memory did not help. Nokia saved pennies and sacrificed market share with that.

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

#135

Post by tominated » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #8

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 wish I had the opportunity to use the N900. I still have a partially working N9 (the SIM holder lock is broken meaning I have to hold the SIM in to use it for calls). I still browse and post on HN using it on occasion.

I still have my N9 lying around somewhere - had to get the sim tray replaced two or three times but otherwise I loved it. How did you update the security certificates? I tried to boot mine up a while back but it was basically unusable on the web because of HTTPS.

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

#136

Post by alex_duf » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

The N9 was the first phone I know to be able to switch apps or close apps using the swipe movement.

It was really hard moving to android as I missed the swiping to navigate the OS.

Now Apple is using swiping and all the cool kids think it's cool again. But like any good hipster I can tell you I was doing it before it was cool.

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

#137

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #121

If you go back a little bit, there are a few devices that really were forks in the road for the industry. Probably the biggest, most important: * Commodore Amiga * Psion PDAs * Nokia N900 * Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone) All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dust…

The Amiga is a little weird, I think it had to many custom chips to be successful. The PC succeeded because of the clones. Cloning the Amiga would be insanely hard, because only Commodore had access to chips required to make the Amiga run.

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

#138

Post by Gravityloss » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

Gravityloss wrote: post #97

whereistimbo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux originated?

No, he's from University of Helsinki.

It's kind of funny that nothing notable in the open source world came out of Aalto. Linus Torvalds and Tatu Ylönen (ssh) studied in University of Helsinki while University of Oulu's Jarkko Oikarinen created IRC.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #94

lenkite wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, please do your own research and read on how the Nokia's board of Directors saw the memo as an act of misjudgement and how Chairman Jorma Ollila gave bitter feedback for it at a board meeting. During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%, their mobile phone market share was halved, their smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company suffered a cumulative €4.9 billion loss

Former employee. I happened to be in Espoo office during the week the memo came out, to give a training on NetAct related technologies. No research needed.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by mavhc » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

whereistimbo wrote: post #124

z3t4 wrote: post #114

Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.

I wonder why Nokia didn't go to Android route. It's like it still want to have a platform where it is seen as king and not as another commodity player. Or maybe Nokia was just having a pet peeve with Google.

Nokia was a hardware company, they didn't value software. They'd design a phone, and then pick an OS to run on it at the last minute.