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Nokia N900 Necromancy

yaky.dev

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Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#31

Post by thesandlord »

xp84 wrote: post #7
xiaomai wrote: post #3

I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.

There are DOZENS OF US! Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!) I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to adm…

I remember running around campus looking for WiFi hotspots with my N810, using Google Voice to text my friends ($0.10 per text, no thank you!). Learned so much Linux admin skills that became so useful later in life. Favorite device ever! Eventually moved to Android smartphones but the ease of hacking, the amazing community (internettablettalk.com, looks like its gone now :( unfortunately...)

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#32

Post by Arch-TK »

yaky wrote: post #27
d3Xt3r wrote: post #24

I recall there was a project to revive the N900 with modern internals, anyone know what happened to it?

There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up though: https://neo900.org/#main

It wasn't really abandoned so much as killed by PayPal.

The project used PayPal to gather downpayments, PayPal decided to lock the funds for months (almost a year or maybe longer IIRC) because they saw money coming in but no confirmation of goods coming out. And, you know, when it comes to big companies, no explanation is sufficient, you are guilty of something because some heuristic said so, so the funds were locked, legal threats didn't work (try threatening a company with the power of a small/medium country), and by the time they got their money back, key people who were going to work at a discount to cover key milestones had moved on.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#33

Post by hexnuts »

thesandlord wrote: post #31
xp84 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are DOZENS OF US! Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!) I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to adm…

I remember running around campus looking for WiFi hotspots with my N810, using Google Voice to text my friends ($0.10 per text, no thank you!). Learned so much Linux admin skills that became so useful later in life. Favorite device ever! Eventually moved to Android smartphones but the ease of hacking, the amazing community (internettablettalk.com, looks like its gone now :( unfortunately...)

You could always get something like a PinePhone.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#37

Post by gbil »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #14
j16sdiz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world

Should still be fine for at least a few years here.

Depends on the country and provider but is sooner than later in Europe and I hate it that 2G is going away since all my old devices are not going to work again…

https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#39

Post by picture »

andai wrote: post #36

Can someone explain the use of super capacitors here? Do they function as a battery?

It's because the phone design needs the battery to help stabilize the voltage under load. As we know, digital devices can nearly instantaneously change the amount of current they consume and thus require layers of energy storage to accommodate the transient currents quickly. However, the changing current consumption doesn't just happen briefly. It sometimes continues to ramp for more than milliseconds (a glacial time frame for modern electronics). Thus generally every component in the power supply network of a design serves some stabilization and filtering role, including the batteries.

It appears that in this case, as the original battery aged, its internal apparent resistance (ESR) increased beyond the original design expectations, to a point where the phone won't work when plugged in to a charging cable because despite the charging cable most likely being able to deliver sufficient power at DC, it had too much impedance to supply it quickly enough. When current is demanded from a source that has too high impedance to supply it, the voltage drops. This will result in significant voltage ripple to the power supply of the digital circuits, which can cause logic to not function correctly.

Adding a large capacitor basically replaced the filtering and stabilization role of the original battery.

Interestingly people often intentionally remove capacitors for side channel measurements and glitching attacks.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#40

Post by LeoPanthera »

j16sdiz wrote: post #11
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…

> The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world

Can I broadcast my own 3G cell inside my house with some magic radio device?
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