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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

#171

Post by u801e »

tominated wrote: post #135
u801e wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't updated the security certificates so far, bit I don't think that most of the TLS connection issues are due to expired CA certificates in the certificate bundle. I believe it's because it can't negotiate a mutually agreed upon cipher.

It still works with a few websites like this one. In fact, I'm using my N9 to post this comment :-).

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

#172

Post by tom_mellior »

sp332 wrote: post #153
tom_mellior wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with unconstrained multitasking? I thought it worked well on the N900. I also think it works well on Android.

Apps can't even reliably sync data on Android without using a special Google-hosted remote service that pings your phone when there is an update. Music apps have to register specially so they don't get killed in the background.

Android is constrained in that sense, I agree. I thought the OP meant constrained like iPhones of the period were: No pretense of multitasking, every task switch being "close an app, open another one".

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

#173

Post by seba_dos1 »

simonh wrote: post #157
seba_dos1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python on iOS is still a joke compared to what you can do on phones like Librem 5 or PinePhone, or even several other devices via distros like postmarketOS.

In what way? On my devices I have full access to the native APIs and robust networking libraries for access to web services. There's Git integration available. I'm not aware of any Android programming environments that provide on-device GUI builders. I can sync code using iCloud or Dropbox if Git is too heavyweight. Frankly the options on Android look extremely primitive in comparison, and largely depend on off-devic…

In a way that Python is provided by the system out-of-box, you can use regular PyGObject bindings for everything (or Pyside or whatever else you want), use any third party modules from system repos or pip - exactly how you would on a desktop; you can even use it to write system daemons. Neither iOS or Android can compete with that.

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

#174

Post by seba_dos1 »

MayeulC wrote: post #78
seba_dos1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One could possibly make a shim

That has been done already: https://github.com/openpvrsgx-devgroup

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

#175

Post by seba_dos1 »

pabs3 wrote: post #123

I hear that the N900 is the best supported mobile device in mainline Linux, except perhaps for the PowerVR GPU, although there are rumours ImgTec are writing an open source driver for Linux & Mesa for PowerVR.

I've heard those rumors for about 10 years already though :)

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

#176

Post by toyg »

fifilura wrote: post #150
vesinisa wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It wasn't about performance; GTK (or rather a GTK-based framework called Hildon) continued to be the default toolkit all the way to Maemo 5 ("Fremantle"), which is what shipped on the N900. It was also what Intel used on Moblin, the OS that was supposed to merge with Maemo to become MeeGo.

The issue with QT was all about Nokia: QT was supposed to save the Symbian platform, and also provide an on-ramp to Maemo (at least in theory - in practice nobody was really committed to that...). So the Maemo folks were obligated to switch to QT, which they did fairly easily; the result was what shipped on the N9, effectively Maemo 6 ("Harmattan") rebranded as "MeeGo 1.2".

In short: QT was adopted to please the Symbian people, and it was all for nothing anyway. That suited me just fine when first announced (Hildon was an under-documented mess of C with obsolete and unusable Python bindings, whereas QT had first-class wrappers like PyQt), but many Maemo old-timers never really warmed to it.

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

#177

Post by anthk »

Tor3 wrote: post #103
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 used my N900 until a week ago, I finally moved the SIM card over to another phone (a dual-SIM one), because the (original) battery didn't take much charge anymore. Hardware-wise it's as good as new (mine is Made in Finland). Over the years I've used it to do support work in Antarctica using VPN from whatever cafeteria I was at at the time, other types of work where I needed a Linux computer and only had the phone,…

>'ve used it to do support work in Antarctica

That should be a whole post by itself.

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

#179

Post by ddalex »

simonh wrote: post #108
markb139 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a good point. I think it highlights the fact that these are not really the same kinds of device, so can't be evaluated on the same criteria. If we were still just buying phones nobody would spend that much on something that consumes so much power. The mistake Nokia and the others made was they thought the iPhone was just a phone.

I still remember a Nokia sales rep telling me when iPhone just hitting the shelves that the lack of stylus for input will doom it.

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

#180

Post by frals »

Larrikin wrote: post #29

This was a neat phone to have during it's time, but I remember having it for a while and the killer app that came out months after I got the phone was MMS. The engineers at Nokia just couldn't figure it out but someone hacked on it long enough to enable it. Fairly certain they flew the guy out and offered him a job.

o/

Nokia had actually done the groundwork for a fair bit of MMS support and they were really helpful with answering questions (they even shipped a list of access point names in PR1.2 to make fMMS much easier to set up)... But yepp, I ended up working at Nokia afterwards :D

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