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Nokia N900 Necromancy

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Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#91

Post by cl3misch »

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…

I think OP wants it to be an always-on device. The last sentence in the post is

> Nokia N900 enjoying its new life as an online radio device using Open Media Player.

But I agree with your sentiment. Using supercaps seems overengineered to me if the device is connected anyway.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#92

Post by gbil »

secult wrote: post #87
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

In Europe we keep 2G as a failsafe, deprecating only 3G.

nope, check the link I posted in another comment: https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/#europe

please note that the list is not fully up to date, eg. in Germany Voda and Telekom have said that they will sunset 2G in summer 2028.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#93

Post by SahAssar »

secult wrote: post #87
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

In Europe we keep 2G as a failsafe, deprecating only 3G.

Not true, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out

Many countries/carriers in europe have already shut down 2G, many will shut it down in 2027. A few will keep it a few years more.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#94

Post by dtj1123 »

Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off?

I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance.

I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery? How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you even tell if an internal partition is corrupted?

This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable, but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to mastery.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#95

Post by daveoc64 »

gbil wrote: post #37
seba_dos1 wrote: post #14

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/

That article is full of made up slop - at least in terms of Europe.

Most of the dates stated are just plain wrong.

The UK dates are completely wrong - by 5 years in most cases.

All of the UK's 2G networks are still running, and the last won't be switched off until at least 2030.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#96

Post by mpol »

henearkr wrote: post #90
imp0cat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the Jolla preorder? It was on hn a few days ago. That is the spiritual successor of the N9XX line. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder

I don't see any keyboard or stylus in that Jolla. For me that is not even in the same league than the N900.

There is the Gemini PDA from 2018 which has a physical keyboard. I heard it was mostly a disappointment.

There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.

All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego from Nokia.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#97

Post by chriswarbo »

larodi wrote: post #77
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…

It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly. But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps. The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.

A bigger mistake was to not give the N770, N800, etc. phone capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn't even consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS. They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#98

Post by Sammi »

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off? I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance. I still f…

I don't have a degree in low voltage electrical engineering, but haven worked close to people who are this does all look like grunt work in that field. So maybe get a bachelor in low voltage electrical engineering? It's all as much digital/computational as it is actually physical these days. Lots of educated electrical engineers end up as software devs, often doing the low level coding. Bootloaders, firmware, and drivers are stuff you have to figure out if you want to get modern electrical hardware to do anything.

Re: Nokia N900 Necromancy

#100

Post by chriswarbo »

fsflover wrote: post #80
jillesvangurp wrote: post #66

I still have one in a drawer from when I worked at Nokia around 2009. Great device. I also had the N800 before that. What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the full keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was Linux phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-get install whatever the hell you wanted. Including compilers, developer tools, openssh, and whatever you could think of.…

> What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the full keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was Linux phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-get install whatever the hell you wanted. Such phones exist today, too. Sent from my Librem 5.

Indeed, I had a Freerunner back then (the N900 came out after, and I couldn't get its predecessors since they weren't phones, as the parent points out). It served me well for about a decade, and I've now upgraded to a Pinephone.
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