Both me and my brother had one when it came out and I can honestly say it's the shittiest phone I've had. But this is a matter of ideology.
Care to develop why it was shitty?
Well it was not without its faults; the software was generally just buggy and laggy, battery life was quite poor, device was bulky and heavy, the resistive screen was bit iffy at times, there weren't that huge library of notable apps, etc.
And this is coming from someone with fond memories of N900.
Both me and my brother had one when it came out and I can honestly say it's the shittiest phone I've had. But this is a matter of ideology.
Care to develop why it was shitty?
The N900 wasn't all that great as a phone. The OS was buggy and you had to go through hoops to do basic things like send MMS pictures. It wasn't the best phone, but it was an amazing pocket computer at the time. You could load a variety of operating systems and tinker around with it and it had a hardware keyboard.
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? N900 had: - HW keyboard - Pixel-accurate touchscreen (with stylus) - Desktop-ish hacker/FOSS friendly Linux OS Essentially N900 was the embodiment of the dreams of what Nokia could have been if it weren't for EVIL Elop and MS ruining everything, and that is why the device has small cult following. There has been occasional HW keyboar…
I don't think the N900 was the embodiment of the dream of what Nokia could have been without Elop, the N9/N950 were. Both were beautifully designed phones, with a unique and powerful operating system: swipe-based interaction, social feed screen, multitask, beautiful applications, good development environment (Qt).. This was the direction Nokia should have gone toward.. Edit: typos.
You have to realize the timeframe that N900 was released: 2009. Back then, it was way ahead of most other smartphones (including iPhone), and had multitasking to boot. The resolution was touted as "better than DVD". It had a commandline out of the box, and not some watered down, misplace all the system files version either. It was basically Debian on a phone, with smooth, beautiful graphics, a decent package management system, and tons of possibilities (Rovio ported Angry Birds to it!). Oh, and did I mention it also had Qt, including Python QT, with IDE options (including emacs) on the phone? Sure, the N9 was pretty, but it had no hardware keyboard, and the N950 doesn't count as you still can't easily get one (you had to be an active Maemo developer to get one).
I still really want a device like this, but married with a Psion. Clamshell, good keyboard, but with the modern trimmings of a high quality, accurate touchscreen and persistent 3G access. The Psion's were amazing, and I think a modern version would make a really, really interesting device.
So this is close, but it needs a movable screen and a more Psion-like keyboard. Maybe I could hack together though.
Aren't most Android phone pretty open in practice? If you're able to rebuild your kernel then what's stopping your from tinkering with the hardware or installing whatever OS you want?
The only closed bits remaining are the firmware blobs for certain IPs but is it really limiting? How many time did you think "man, I wish I could write a custom firmware for my GSM chip!".
Not saying that it's not interesting "for the principle" to have completely open phones but to be brutally honest I'm not ready to use a low resolution resistive display for the sake of it being open source...
The Open Pandora 1Ghz has the same hardware, and is already very much open as well, and has a better keyboard and a lot of software already available. It can run Android and Slackware, Bodhi linux, Debian and so on, in a pocket size format. The only difference with the Neo900 is that it's not a phone.
The only difference with the Neo900 is that it's not a phone.
And that, right there, can make all the difference. Some of us don't want to carry a separate phone and pocket computer. Believe it or not, there are still some places in the world that aren't blanketed with WiFi.
Kudos for posting another awesome open alternative, however (even though it could have used a link; but Google turns it up right quick).
I did some development on the N810 several years ago and I thought it was great. One of the coolest things was being able to write PyGTK code and run it seamless both on my desktop and the device.
I still really want a device like this, but married with a Psion. Clamshell, good keyboard, but with the modern trimmings of a high quality, accurate touchscreen and persistent 3G access. The Psion's were amazing, and I think a modern version would make a really, really interesting device. So this is close, but it needs a movable screen and a more Psion-like keyboard. Maybe I could hack together though.
I would like something like that too. I think there's a (probably small) market for a device that is about the size of a psion series 5 but perhaps with a more full size keyboard.