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Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

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Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#131

Post by rodgerd »

rcarmo wrote: post #75

I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used. The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functional…

> Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500

You're right, but you're going to upset a whole bunch of people who think that what people wanted was Debian on a phone, and are uninterested in hearing the last 10 years of market evidence to the contrary.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#132

Post by zandorg »

dagw wrote: post #102
Zenst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I owned one of these, not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded if year before. Sure this was an all in one but no, always laughed at the ariel and the thing felt like you could almost use it as an ice-pick with the ariel folded down and the unit closed. But hey, was neat - just the usual issues of these open/close designs was the ribbon cable to connect the screen - those always seem to fail outside warranty period.…

not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded if year before. The 5MX was released 1999 and the Communicator in 1996. That being said, I agree that the 5MX was fantastic piece of hardware that in many ways has never been matched.

I use an Epoc32 emulator on my PC so I can do Agenda on that, and it beeps me my reminders.

I got sick of buying Psion 5's and 5MX's because they always broke in 6 months.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#133

Post by bartread »

rcarmo wrote: post #75

I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used. The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functional…

Out of interest I just had a look on eBay to see what Nokia 9500s go for and... wow. The answer is, kind of, proper money. As in, hundreds of pounds for unlocked models in good condition. Might not sound like that much in an era where premium flagship phones typically cost £1000-1500, but still pretty nuts for a phone that was released all the way back in 2004. I guess for a retro collector with the right sort of fetish this is reasonable[0].

[0] Btw, I'm absolutely not dissing this: I have my own fetish - something of a thing for old synths, particularly those of the early-ish digital era in the 80s that are still fairly affordable, and recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum machine... from Australia. It wasn't _that_ expensive, but it's a similar level of expenditure. I love old analogue synths too: I just can't afford them and, with these, because they're a bit more sexy and fashionable than the digital options, you can often pick up much less expensive modern day reproductions and homages.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#134

Post by SeanLuke »

noipv4 wrote: post #54

I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS. I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.

I can literally -- and I mean that word in the proper usage -- think of nothing in the N900 (or earlier models) that changed the world in any way. And I still own, and occasionally use, my N800.

Prior to the iPhone the acme of portable touchscreen interface design was the Newton Messagepad 2100. Its interface was superior to Maemo in practically every way, despite being discontinued ten years prior.

Maemo feels like a crappy, half-assed attempt to implement some of the Newton's magic on top of X11, and with weird desktop mouse-oriented design elements (menus, scroll bars, combo boxes, Windows-style tree-views, even cursors in some apps) bolted on awkwardly without any thought about their appropriateness to a tablet operating system. I wrote an extensive article comparing the two way back when, when I was doing a moderate number of contributions to the N800 platform. Maemo was amateurish at best, with an incredible array of inconsistent and obtuse iconography, several inconsistent sizes and designs for the same exact kind of GUI element (text buttons, icons, ), a complete lack of state persistence, absolutely horrible fonts, and a desperate need to be backward compatible with X11, hardly the best choice for a mobile OS GUI foundation. It was clearly built by linux software developers and not GUI designers.

iOS didn't borrow anything from the N900: it borrowed directly from the Newton and from MacOS and NeXTSTEP, when it wasn't inventing things from whole cloth.

Thankfully now Android has shown us that Linux can shine in the mobile pad market, if you jettison X, stupid archaic design elements from desktop GUIs, and design a consistent and organized interface from the ground up considering the needs of the device and and user.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#135

Post by znpy »

p4bl0 wrote: post #41
fsflover wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone . FAQ about the first one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque... .

I know this is off-topic but wow, following your links I just read this on the Puri.sm site: > Introducing Librem AweSIM: > Unlimited talk, text, and data for just $99/mo "just"? Really? Isn't that awefully expensive?! I have a plan with ulnimited talk, text, and 40GB of data that I use extensively (including for a lot of youtube videos) and I've never hit this limit. I pay €8/mo for that. For people who would need e…

> I pay €8/mo for that.

Because you live in happy Europe, fellow european.

But people in the US have to pay that ridiculous amount of money for on average worse service.

Europe is very well connected.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#136

Post by toast0 »

bserge wrote: post #90
mnmmn123456 wrote: post #13

It didn't change the world. The iPhone did 10 years later. I guess the article is of interest because it has this wrong claim weaved in and even at it's time the "Nokia Communicator" wasn't a big success. Maybe we didn't know what FAANG-like success looks like at that time and everyone thought "Nokia is such a respectable, successful company in Scandinavia". Probably the article is of interest now because, we didn't…

Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely ignored consumers.

Did Windows Mobile have firmware updates independent of carriers? AFAIK, Symbian didn't.

Getting updates on the regular changed the world (not always for the better)

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#137

Post by marcodiego »

fsflover wrote: post #110
marcodiego wrote: post #105

Nokia 9000 may be a landmark but nothing impressed more than the day I saw N900 running OpenOffice. I knew it was not a good idea, but that deeply impressed me.

Librem 5 smartphone runs a desktop GNU/Linux with desktop apps. You can even connect a keyboard and screen to it.

Yes. But it was not available more than a decade ago.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#138

Post by 908B64B197 »

jareklupinski wrote: post #129
tyingq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)

Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm... At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

The Storm is quite infamous because it launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G.

Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#139

Post by tyingq »

908B64B197 wrote: post #138
jareklupinski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm... At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

The Storm is quite infamous because it launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G. Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.

At the time, it was much better for email if your backend was Exchange.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#140

Post by 908B64B197 »

bserge wrote: post #90
mnmmn123456 wrote: post #13

It didn't change the world. The iPhone did 10 years later. I guess the article is of interest because it has this wrong claim weaved in and even at it's time the "Nokia Communicator" wasn't a big success. Maybe we didn't know what FAANG-like success looks like at that time and everyone thought "Nokia is such a respectable, successful company in Scandinavia". Probably the article is of interest now because, we didn't…

Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely ignored consumers.

No apps.
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