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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

#141

Post by speeder »

Nokia behaviour in Brazil infuriates me.

1. The burning platform thingy happened when Nokia was absolutely dominating Brazillian smartphone market, people had even ported Counter-Strike to Symbian! Then suddenly it was dead, and didn't even get replaced by iPhone as the memo predicted, instead it got replaced by chinese no-name phones (until the government got annoyed and banned them outright... if you use a imported phone, cell towers can kick it out of the network)

2. Nokia abandoned all their business here for some years.

3. Nokia is now back, but all they do is half-hearteadly sell some crappy androids, they KaiOS market is booming in India, and has much potential in Brazil, but they refuse to sell KaiOS phones here, and you can't import them (because they get kicked out of the network by the cell towers), meanwhile local companies are making crappy KaiOS phones and doing reasonably well.

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

#142

Post by fctorial »

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.

> Google did a major disservice to Linux at large by the rift it caused

What drift?

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by u801e »

gymnodemi wrote: post #49
u801e wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I really wish Nokia had stuck it out with the N9 OS a bit longer

I think we have Stephan Elop to thank for that. I never really understood why Nokia didn't just focus on the market outside the US. Had they continued producing phones like the N9, I'm sure they could have retained a lot of market share in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia.

> I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired

I'm not sure whether all of the CAs had expired, but I wonder if it would be possible to get an updated package with up to date CAs. The main issue I have is that it can't negotiate an agreed upon cipher when trying to establish a TLS connection.

I'm still able to use the Firefox browser to browse a number of websites like Facebook and Reddit. Hacker news still works with the built-in browser. Facebook sometimes works with the default browser and the old subdomain reddit website will lock up the default browser in my experience (the current reddit website layout is a no-go).

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

#145

Post by nfriedly »

+1 for the GPD call out! I have a GPD Win Max, and while I mostly use it for playing games, I have done some programing and networking work on it.

Although I feel like the GPD MicroPC might be of more interest to the type of person who would have gone for a N900. It's a bit smaller than the Pocket 2 that they linked to, while at the same time having a better port selection - https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc

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

#146

Post by u801e »

kbr2000 wrote: post #70
gymnodemi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm still using my N9, and I'm holding my SIM card in place using a big rubber band wrapped twice along the longer side of the phone :) Lately the "main" button has been failing, and since tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep anymore, I can't pick up calls anymore. So to access the phone, I get out the SIM and re-insert it. It's time to abandon it here too, but it was an excellent phone in use for almost 10…

I don't look forward to the day I have to completely abandon it. I have mine set to show the screen when double tapping it (which still works better than my Nokia 7.2 Android phone).

> since tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep anymore, I can't pick up calls anymore.

Mine will show the the screen and prompt me to swipe up to answer the call. Does yours work in a different way, or is the touch system failing?

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

#147

Post by nivenkos »

Gravityloss wrote: post #138
Gravityloss wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an incredible output for such a small country really.

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

#148

Post by vesinisa »

toyg wrote: post #98
Gravityloss wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc.. Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009. I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.

Symbian folks inside Nokia at the time lived in a reality distortion field. Your experience is not the only instance where the Symbian division inside the company railroaded the Maemo project, which they saw first and foremost as a threat to their jobs and political dominance. As TFA notes, N900 was preceded by N770, N800, and N810 "internet tablets". N810 in particular was basically the same device as N900, but despite having otherwise state of the art wireless communication tech all of them lacked one very crucial component: a mobile data modem. Internet connection was only possible over WiFi (or even RJ45-USB dongle) but not SIM.

The reason for this was of course not technical - the Symbian folks inside Nokia simply managed to convince the executive level management that adding mobile data would turn these devices from PDAs to a smartphones, and it would be very ill-advisable to launch a competing smartphone platform to Symbian.

When Maemo folks finally got a chance to "give us a try" (and I guess management saw with the competition that they needed something more modern), the result was N900. Considering it was meant as a "niche" device its sales exceeded all projections. However, in the grand scheme of things it was just an experiment designed to fail and further cement the dominance of Symbian.

I think Nokia also developed a fully-working tablet around either Maemo or MeeGo. It was literally ready to ship, but was at last minute cancelled before the launch event due to backroom dealing again by the Symbian folks.

It has all been documented in the book "Operation Elop", which paints a pretty good picture about everything that went on behind the scenes during the demise of the once great Nokia: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ The book is based around absolutely exclusive interviews of people who served in Nokia's board and top executive positions at the time.

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

#149

Post by twobitshifter »

I remember trying to get the successor N9 which was DOA due to the announcement of the Microsoft deal. Nokia had their platform to go up against Android and Apple, but it was simply too late. I think the N9 compares favorably against both iPhones and Android at the time, and Nokia was ahead in terms of cameras.

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

#150

Post by fifilura »

vesinisa wrote: post #148
toyg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009. I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.

Symbian folks inside Nokia at the time lived in a reality distortion field. Your experience is not the only instance where the Symbian division inside the company railroaded the Maemo project, which they saw first and foremost as a threat to their jobs and political dominance. As TFA notes, N900 was preceded by N770, N800, and N810 "internet tablets". N810 in particular was basically the same device as N900, but desp…

Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of realising they had built exactly what was needed.

It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as in Symbian.

The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the platform was bump in the road.

(I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++, so performance on this type of devices was problematic. Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit weird given the long history of Gtk.)

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