Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nokia N900 Necromancy

yaky.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 193 posts

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#21

Post by Nursie »

> A quick glance at the forums also confirms that USB port was poorly designed and is prone to breaking.

That was the death of mine. I had an external battery charger that I could use to charge the machine overnight, but it was too much of a hassle so it got recycled and I moved on to a Galaxy Note, which everyone laughed at for being enormous but now look at us, the base iPhone 17 is around the same size...

The N900 was a great little device, it was like having a tiny computer with full keyboard in my pocket. It's just a shame the built-in FM transmitter didn't work reliably, because I used it to listen to music in the car a lot.

It was also amazing to be able to download the whole world's map data (such as it was in 2010) to the device, so the GPS navigation still worked off-grid (deep-outback Australia in 2010 was not always that good for data connections).

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#22

Post by specialp »

I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio Angry Birds

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#23

Post by rboyd »

qingcharles wrote: post #12
stego-tech wrote: post #9

Man, I miss my N80ie. The towns I lived in didn’t get UMTS/3G until the ‘10s, but the EDGE radios were enough . Loved Symbian, miss it.

My first Internet phone was the Nokia 9000, which was limited to GSM (9600bps). I built and debugged one of the first major music streaming services on that connection because I was working remote and my DSL got cut off. I had to add a 2Kbps stream option to the production servers for myself just so I could test it.

is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#25

Post by Retr0id »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #6

Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere? Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover. The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some damage in my pocket and got a small crack in it…

> it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover

Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#26

Post by internet2000 »

specialp wrote: post #22

I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio Angry Birds

Web browsing wasn't a particular strength of it. I remember the N900's browser came with a version of Gecko around a year old by the time. Flash support was a downside. And of course, contemporary iPhones ran circles around it in smoothness.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#29

Post by seba_dos1 »

Retr0id wrote: post #25
seba_dos1 wrote: post #6

Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere? Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover. The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some damage in my pocket and got a small crack in it…

> it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.

Yes it does (based on a hall sensor), though looking up it turns out that it's actually the Nokia's kernel that does it, so other OSes may not do it.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#30

Post by seba_dos1 »

yaky wrote: post #19
seba_dos1 wrote: post #6

Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere? Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover. The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some damage in my pocket and got a small crack in it…

Where's the fun in that? Maemo wiki states that Maemo Leste should be run from SD card. I am actually surprised that the phone can use the SD slot at high enough speed.

I agree that fun is enough of a reason, but treating the battery contacts with 5V seems like a rather sadistic kind of fun to me :P
Post reply on HN