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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

What specific concerns did you have with Maemo? Both the N900 and N9 combined "real Linux" with a handful of mass-market apps like Skype and maps, with the N900 having both a hardware keyboard and touchscreen.

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The UI was a joke designed by "year of the Linux desktop" believers. I mean just look at it: http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/reviews/11886-image/scree...

Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.

I think that's from a n800 or n810, which had no phone functionality and were based on gtk+ rather than Qt/QML. n900 calendar was totally different.

Yes, that appears to be from the N8xx. The N800 was contemporaneous with the iPhone so I don't feel this is an unfair comparison. It shows how Nokia had the notion of touchscreen UIs completely wrong.

I still insist it's an unfair comparison because the linux tablets were a minor sideshow to the symbian phones. Then of course it's a fair comparison in that symbian wasn't great either, but at least they didn't just minimally repurpose a desktop UI.

Expected something awful.

That looks decent.

Did you ever try syncing contacts with a Maemo? Because if you think going into redpill mode and configuring a command line sync so you can get your address book syncing with anything represents anything than a steam mound of UX shit, you are either actually insane, or so out of touch with what any normal human might think of as a reasonable experience that you might as well be.

Maemo was shit compared to a Palm Pilot.

Bluetooth contact import worked fine, and Skype synced fine as well, which was what mattered for me at least.

On the other hand, having an ACTUAL Linux command line with ACTUAL root and an ACTUAL keyboard was worth gold, and still sorely missed today.

It is not missed if you consider your device a terminal to your real Linux server and use Prompt on iOS as an example.

Sounds wonderful reat if you enjoy GPRS latency and typing code with soft keyboards. I'd also assume that working with local peripherals work great with that setup?

Saved my bacon couple of times. Definitely not for regular job, but a very good thing to have for just in case situations.

The chief feature I miss on Android is the ability to user rsync to syncrhonise its content with my PC in a reasonable way. I can rsync to the phone -- but none of the apps are allowed to read the directory thus synced.

Maybe IOs is more forgiving. But how would a terminal emulator help?

Currently the best evolution of this is probably Sailfish OS, on a Jolla with a hardware keyboard Other Half.

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