Nokia N900 Necromancy • Hacker News Board

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#51

Post by girvo » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC

sollewitt wrote: post #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 U…

Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#52

Post by cookiengineer » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:32 AM UTC

bpiroman wrote: post #10

Seeing this makes me wanna get the Blackberry passport!!! And boot linux on it

Check out the Hackberry designs from ZitaoTech. They're pretty amazing. I'm currently in the process of porting Plasma Mobile onto the device so that there's a better UI for it.

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#53

Post by kilpikaarna » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:46 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #40

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

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

Not sure about 3G, but here's an example of 2G: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMWvA4Ty1Wk

Edit: same as already posted hackaday, oop!

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#54

Post by distances » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:48 AM UTC

space_ghost wrote: post #8

I loved my N900. Enough that I eventually replaced it with an N9. It wasn't the same, tho. The N900 had a certain charm.

It wasn't the same, but I had both and really loved the N9. My all-time favourite phone.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#55

Post by vvpan » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

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

I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#56

Post by qingcharles » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:55 AM UTC

rboyd wrote: post #23

qingcharles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes! I was so excited he had that phone in the movie.

They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in the production must have owned one of these phones. Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong" way -- they would put the external screen to their face, like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here:

https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#57

Post by Sharlin » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

girvo wrote: post #51

sollewitt wrote: post #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 U…

Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live

It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#58

Post by sschueller » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

I find the BL-5J battery format and its siblings quite cool actually. They fit much better for some projects than a 18650 etc. I wish there where more standard sized batteries and PCB holder for batteries like the BL-5J. While I can get many 18650 battery holders for PCBs even surface mount I have not seen anything more compact.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#59

Post by testfrequency » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

sollewitt wrote: post #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 U…

My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien monologue scenes.

It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#60

Post by 9notorp » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

that was an enjoyable read! loved reading stuff about smartphones on forums, especially symbian ones where the die hard fanboys absoultely believed that this device was better than the iphones and htcs had to offer (including me). too bad maemo / meego died off, we may have seen more interesting devices. loved the "Contains no LLM-generated content" bit.