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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

#161

Post by pessimizer »

danans wrote: post #159

I had an N810 (predecessor to the N900), and it was very cool - at the time, it really felt like "the future". However, I must admit that I liked it for what it was -a toy - and not for what it could actually do in a productive sense. At the end of the day, it wasn't possible to perform any sustained productive activity on it. In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an inverse relationship between t…

I hate to keep evangelizing about the N900, but I didn't bring my laptop on business trips to conferences (i.e. non-coding business trips.) The N900 was enough for me to ssh work I had to do at the office, and enough for me for everything else.

My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|" wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a screen touch to get to.

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

#162

Post by linmob »

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…

Another nice OS for the N900 is Maemo Leste (https://leste.meamo.org), which is basically the same software as ran originally, but modernized; sadly, when I last tried it, it still lacked a GUI for key features like calls and texts.

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

#163

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj »

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.

nice. now i feel even more robbed of a decent mobile experience, thanks to nokia and tel co's monopolistic dealings.

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

#164

Post by CharleFKane »

I got in a little late: some of my friends bought N770s early on, but I didn't get in until the N800.

I own (still) an N800 and an N810. Though I haven't picked up either in a while, I thought they were nifty devices at the time, and should pick them back up again. I still think they have a lot going for them. (The N800 was actually the first mobile navigation system I ever used, with an external Bluetooth GPS and software based on OpenStreetMaps.)

I was unable to find an N900 anywhere when it was new. I was met with pretty much blank stares.

Eventually, an online vendor got some refurbished N900s in stock at a good price. I ordered one, got it, plugged it in overnight to charge...

...and in the morning, it was totally dead. I emailed the vendor and asked for an exchange because, you know, one bad one out of the bunch, they were refurbs anyway, no problem.

The vendor wrote back and told me that they had received a batch of 28 of them. ALL the ones they got had some sort of problem that resulted in a return, they would not be getting any more of them, and if I sent it back they'd give me a refund.

Thus ended my N900 experiment.

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

#165

Post by dntrkv »

alex_duf wrote: post #136

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.

I think the Palm WebOS was really ahead of it's time with how they handled multiple apps as "cards." The iOS UI is basically a clone of their approach. The Palm Pre brought some really interesting concepts to smartphones at the time.

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

#166

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

pjmlp wrote: post #84
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…

Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had touchscreen phones running Symbian on sale in 2002!

multi-touch + properly thought through nad responsive UI design was the dealbreaker.

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

#167

Post by danans »

pessimizer wrote: post #161
danans wrote: post #159

I had an N810 (predecessor to the N900), and it was very cool - at the time, it really felt like "the future". However, I must admit that I liked it for what it was -a toy - and not for what it could actually do in a productive sense. At the end of the day, it wasn't possible to perform any sustained productive activity on it. In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an inverse relationship between t…

I hate to keep evangelizing about the N900, but I didn't bring my laptop on business trips to conferences (i.e. non-coding business trips.) The N900 was enough for me to ssh work I had to do at the office, and enough for me for everything else. My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|" wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a screen touch to get to.

I fully believe and acknowledge that for some very niche use cases, this might work. In particular, the specific use case of "ssh to a server and run a few commands". But even in that example, if the output of the command is many pages of error or logging output that you need to diagnose, the tiny screen and keyboard are going to become ineffective very quickly.

Even while at a conference and doing conference-y things like modifying, giving, or reviewing presentations, a bigger screen and keyboard are pretty indispensable.

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

#168

Post by pjmlp »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #166
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had touchscreen phones running Symbian on sale in 2002!

multi-touch + properly thought through nad responsive UI design was the dealbreaker.

Agreed, still they were touch screen regardless of having a stylus.

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

#169

Post by toyg »

simonh wrote: post #127
toyg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still cannot ship the resulting apps though. One has to hack around with the likes of Kivy to get that. On Maemo you could just ship a Deb (at least outside the braindead Nokia store, which was restricted to C++). The sad thing is, I remember attending a PyConUK about 10 years ago where this was a clear item in the keynote (by Van Lindberg, iirc): "the Python story on mobile is non-existent". Everybody agreed it…

Several apps have been shipped based on Pythonista, including games. The developer released an Xcode template, you drop your Python code into it and build an app from it. Pyto is open source, once you have a working app developed on-device you can just pull Pyto from Github and add your code to build an app the same way, but it's not as complete as Pythonista. There are non-python dev environments that enable the sam…

Ah wow, this looks nice! I’ll check it out!

It was completely off my radar, clearly - it could use more publicity then...

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

#170

Post by SeanLuke »

I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed. Because the interface was really terrible. It was so bad I even made an article about it here: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/

I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in many respects of course, but its interface was elegant, consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful.

I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking that you didn't need one. And boy did it show.

Also, terrible battery life.

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