> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today?
N900 had:
- HW keyboard
- Pixel-accurate touchscreen (with stylus)
- Desktop-ish hacker/FOSS friendly Linux OS
Essentially N900 was the embodiment of the dreams of what Nokia could have been if it weren't for EVIL Elop and MS ruining everything, and that is why the device has small cult following.
There has been occasional HW keyboard equipped Android devices since, but they have usually been of limited availability, and while Meego lives on as Mer (and the rest of the family) it afaik is not really usable as daily driver (yet). And Mer has been adapted to fairly limited number of devices, none which afaik have HW keyboards (besides N9x0).
My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity.
What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?
I liked my Nokia N900 and kept up for a while with attempts to keep its Maemo going after Nokia abandoned it. However, a decade later Maemo has bitrotted and its dev community has dwindled away. Nowadays the Phosh interface (i.e. the Librem phone, or Mobian running on the PinePhone) is seen as the most promising Free Software choice in the long term. Sailfish OS is also actively maintained, but its UI layer is closed source.
>sounds great at first until you need to make a call and it suddenly drops.
Agreed, I had an N900 running maemo long ago. It was a novel idea to have a Linux device in my pocket, and being able to just drop in to a terminal or do some X11 forwarding over ssh was kinda neat.
But when you start missing phone calls because the screen becomes unresponsive, or the camera is failing to save a picture due to some driver bug, it's a little hard to convince yourself it's worth it.
A couple of years after the N900 launched and WhatsApp had taken over the (European) world, suddenly the lack of support elevated from minor annoyances to full blown disappointment and having awkward conversations about why I couldn't join the group chat. The much cheaper Nexus 4 would replace it with a much better experience all round.
Though I still have a soft spot for that slide out keyboard.
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today?
The idea of it was great but the phone itself was pretty frustrating.
The idea is that it was a little bitty linux tablet, with something of an open source community behind it, that could also make phone calls. I explained some of my thoughts in this arstechnica thread[0] from 4 years ago.
But the reality once I got the phone was it was just slow and frustrating to use. Aspects of it were great (it multitasked the best of all the phones of its day), but over time it's glitchyness (hanging up on calls instead of answering them, because the buttons jumped around), and the lack of multi touch brought me down.
I still have my N900 in a box somewhere. If anyone in the Boston area wants it, ping me (email address on my profile here) and I'd be happy to give it to you.
> Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago.
All my horses on this being the #1 reason why Microsoft panicked and pushed Nokia into a partnership that ultimately forced Nokia to sell its mobile business to Microsoft, which of course meant the end of Linux in those devices.
> So, here’s a question - when were you last excited for a new phone? Well, I mean really excited?
Every time I got one for use as a main phone. Granted, in the last 15 years I first got Openmoko Neo Freerunner, then Nokia N900, then Librem 5; and before that I was a teenager in the era when getting a phone that had a camera was already cool... but they were all very exciting.
I remember the announcement of the first iPhone (somewhat exciting... but a complete disappointment as soon as it released) and Android (very exciting at first, but then slowly getting to iPhone level of disappointment).
Before the Librem 5 arrived I had to augment my N900 with an Android phone for about two years. That was annoying, but thankfully I could get excited again soon enough.
> Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500
You're right, but you're going to upset a whole bunch of people who think that what people wanted was Debian on a phone, and are uninterested in hearing the last 10 years of market evidence to the contrary.
> MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer.
I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there.
But they never prioritized it above Symbian.
Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release.
If they had iterated on Maemo 5 in that time and put all hands on deck behind it they could have used those ~3 years more productively and been more competitive. Maemo 5 was actually pretty close to what they needed.
Blackberry had a similar situation. Like meego, in bb10 they had a qt based platform in the early 2010s. But it was too late. The biggest blunder is not doing it sooner, before Android solidified.
> How usable is it? Does it have power management? I heard it still doesn't have good battery life or... anything. Did the switch from N900 hurt?
It's perfectly usable in my eyes - well, at least as long as I don't break anything, which can happen :) Lasts on a battery around 10-15 hours, less when under heavy use. Generally long enough for my needs, and there's still a room for improvement in software, so that will likely get better with time. The switch from N900 did not hurt at all (maybe aside of losing the hardware keyboard and having to get used to a 5" phone in my pocket).
> How can you when 3G will be sunsetted?
I'm not aware of any plans to sunset 3G where I live.
> I didn't mention other projects, but speaking of them why didn't you ever get interested in Replicant?
I used to play with Replicant a bit on GTA04 and Galaxy S3, but in the end I'm not interested in Android at all (it's a cool project though and I fully support it).
> With all new android phones being mainlined as well as "old" ones like the S9 way before either was released.
That's far from enough to have a properly functioning GNU/Linux userspace on them (although it is much better than it used to be indeed).
> but my point is that there was work on GNU/linux phones way before L5 or PP
Of course there was, I spent years of my life on it.
> Samsung DEX
Isn't that discontinued?
> Maemo was partially propietary, did it stop you from using it? If not, why ignore Sailfish and not count it?
If you read carefully, I haven't mentioned Maemo at all, for exactly this reason. I only mentioned N900 which I got to port SHR to, but ended up using it with Maemo as my daily driver - which wasn't ideal, but was best that was available back then (I switched to it pretty late anyway, since I stayed on a GTA02 for a few years). I didn't want to switch to more of the same; I wanted to do an upgrade, which is why I only switched when I got a Librem 5.
> That all being said I do admire your dedication to using gnu/linux, but my question is what do you gain from using it?
I am the administrator of my system, just like I am on my desktop, and I find that incredibly powerful. I can easily patch and replace every part of it, even right on the phone, while Android build system is a massive PITA. I often build deb packages straight on my Librem 5. I don't have to break into anything, it's mine. In the past, I made a mistake of getting a Kindle and at some point updating it to a version that didn't have a jailbreak available yet, so I told myself to never willingly rely on jailbreaking again.
> software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago.
You're confusing "features" with the technology delivering them. ;)
> why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)
cough Java cough :)
A friend of mine used a Nokia N900 smartphone (running Maemo Linux), with a single-core 600 MHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. When it finally died, he moved to a recent Samsung Galaxy model, and complained about how it is much laggier when performing the same tasks that the ancient N900 breezed through at buttery smooth 60 FPS.
In terms of hardware form factor was the best smartphone I have ever owed.
What was good about it:
– Metal case, metal hinge, rock-solid clamshell design
– But small enough to use closed as a candybar phone with T9 text input;
– Good 1-handed and two-handed operation;
– Able to view A4 width PDFs at readable size on internal screen;
– Fast accurate thumb typing on internal QWERTY keyboard;
– Data port plus charging port plus headphone socket.
It wasn't perfect. The external numeric keypad needed better spacing, like a 6310i keypad. The internal QWERTY one the same. It needed USB instead of a Nokia port, and a standard-sized headphone jack. It needed an internal touchscreen. It needed more RAM and speed and battery.
But the gestalt, the whole, was better than any Apple minimalist thing.
– Landscape touchscreen smartphone, with a design that made that the primary orientation, although perfectly usable one-handed in landscape;
– Usable physical buttons for up/down/left/right/select in one hand, call/cancel/hangup in the other hand. So, usable in gloves or without access to stylus and fingertips, with tactile feedback, with both hands. Meaning also ideal for gamers;
Best phone and OS according to who? The same folks who cheered on the OpenMoko? As Elop said, the market has turned from a battle of devices into a war of ecosystems. Meego would've ended up like BB10 running on QNX(remember how many folks on here salivated about a QNX based mobile OS?), critically appreciated but with no apps and sales.
Nokia recently became the fourth largest OEM in the US market.
http://pocketnow.com/2013/11/01/nokia-smartphone-sales
I doubt that given Nokia never really had a brand in the US for smartphones, it could've done so without Microsoft's support.
More than just potential. Nokia was a hugely successful mobile phone manufacturer. They still occupy the top two most sold handsets ever, beating even Apple.
> Japanese phones were WAY ahead of the West for absolutely forever.
Not really. Fun fact: In the early 1990s, the largest cellphone brand in Japan was Finnish company Nokia, and Nokia lost its edge there mostly because you could only sell phones through operators and the suppliers played dirty: for example, they refused to sell Nokia color LCD screens.
Now Japanese phones in the late 1990s were indeed the bees knees, but they were incompatible with the rest of the world (PDC/i-mode instead of GSM/WAP/GPRS), they missed the boat on 4G as well (NTT FOMA was the first out the gate, but not standard), and when the iPhone came along it was too late.
I've had a couple of them, they were way ahead of their time. The hardware had a few bugs but the form factor and keyboard were amazing, and the camera was very nice. I actually preferred the resistive touch screen on a slider like that, it made for fewer accidental touches, and it was very precise for stylus use.
There's a (stalled?) project[1] to swap out the main board with a modern, supported replacement, keeping the rest of the hardware the same. I'd love to see the interest in the Pinephone cause that project to wake up again. PostmarketOS would be a good fit for the Neo900.
The N900 begs to differ with that statement. It ran Maemo 5, and (in my personal opinion) was the best phone of its era hands down.
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