Live data from Hacker News

Nokia N900 Necromancy

yaky.dev

41–50 of 193 posts

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#41
The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.

I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.

I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.

The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#42
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

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

I've only heard of doing so for 2G: https://hackaday.com/2025/10/06/2g-gone-bring-it-back-yourse...

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#43
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

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

Not legally. Where I'm from they sold off the old 3G spectrum and frequencies, mostly (all?) to established telcos to use in 4G or 5G mobile services. They will not be happy if you start interfering with their customers there (especially not after the money they spent at the auction for those licenses).

There are some weird bits of the 900MHz band that cross into the fairly free-to-use ISM bands in some countries, and I recall a CCC talk where someone demonstrated a SDR setup doing mobile phone base station stuff by sneaking into what were ISM bands in Germany where he was that handsets would talk to because they were allocated as cellular phone spectrum in other parts of the world. Here in Australia we are limited and can't use the upper end of the 920MHz ISM band with LoRa devices, because Optus bought that spectrum for their phone network.

(Here in Aust4ralia we have other cellular spectrum and phone network problems, where a lot of older devices that support some 4 and/or 5G cannot reliably call 000 (our equivalent emergency number to the US 911), because the fall back to 3G when roaming onto other networks... A few people have died recently, and all the telcos are busy blocking a growing list of phones, mostly older Samsung ones if the noise in mainstream media here is accurate. I know my old but still otherwise functional Galaxy S6 Edge is not on the banned list.)

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Here in Australia 3G is totally gone already. 2G went years ago.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#45
post #11

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

I apologize for being that guy, but they are being deprecated. To depreciate is to decrease in value.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#46
post #7
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…

Back in the day I just had a cheap dumb phone with the $15/mo unlimited 3G data add-on and popped that SIM into whatever other device I was feeling at the time. It seemed like if it wasn't a common phone in the US, Cingular/AT&T never noticed.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#47
I used to work as a software tester in Tampere, Finland with Nokia devices. We didn't test those devices in particular, but they were a big buzz in our office back in the day. I still have my n810, but haven't used it in years after the battery died. I remember adding a bunch of unofficial repos and having things like apache and python running on it and using it as a web server for a while. Eventually the battery was so discharged, even having it plugged in to the PSU would not be enough to keep it powered. It was such a shame it wouldn't run without the battery. I probably would still have use for it.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#48

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device. I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that. I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. The N9 had much better U…

Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#50
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

I apologize for being that guy, but they are being deprecated . To depreciate is to decrease in value.

but then, deprecation causes depreciation in this case, for extra fun.
Post reply on HN