I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.
It's not a success but it hasn't been a failure IMO.
I understand that you can't just straight up copy the functional and beautiful UI from N9, but Sailfish the Sailfish UI was just way too experimental and bare.
I suppose I should try to sell it to some one who can use it but it is such a beautiful thing that I am loath to get rid of it even though I haven't even switched it on for ages.
I found a version of Firefox that worked very well. Haven't tried it for a year or so though.
> Still the best looking phone ever made..
Definitely!
unfortunately, unlike sailfish, tizen lacks support for android apps. the reason for that is that samsung would loose its commercial android license if they added android support to tizen.
Nokia owned Qt and Samsung didn't want to pay fees or buy Qt outright, so they went with the mostly unknown Linux Enlightenment project (didn't hurt that it's main dev worked for them at the time). Likewise, Nokia owned rights to SwipeUI, so they opted for a remake of the Android UI.
If they'd gone with something like a cleanroom implementation of SwipeUI or webOS, I think Tizen could have been a success. Instead, it just feels like a bad, outdated edition of Android. If users wanted that, they'd just use Android instead.
How on earth did this not take off ?
Monies. Microsoft's offer to Nokia was way too lucrative.
Meego being a full rewrite and repackage (qt/rpm whereas maemo was gtk/deb), although it had merits, means development needed to restart from scratch.
Nokia also totally mismanaged dev relations. First it built up dev excitement for Maemo, then announced it was going to be abandoned (for Meego) a few months later.
Meego was a combination of Intel's Moblin (purchased from OpenedHand, a big Linux shop back in the day) and Nokia's Maemo.
Shortly after Intel abandoned the project in favor of Tizen, leaving Nokia holding the bag. Nokia went through the motions until the infamous burning platform memo, driving the last nail.
In some ways, N900/N9 is a parallel with Amiga. Great machine, tremendous excitement by a (small) loyal userbase, mismanaged by development, and now a subject of nostalgia and failed attempts to resurrect the dream.
I believe right now you're best off with /e/ in combination with a Fairphone 3.
Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent platform.
/e/ referred to [1], not Enlightenment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo
I kept my N900 for years longer than most people because it has a quality DAC and, as long as I kept it in airplane mode, it was a good music player for the classical and jazz I listen to on high-quality headphones when traveling. But eventually I realized that the N900 could be totally replaced by simply adding a Bluetooth DAC to the Android smartphone I already have (and I'm glad I did that, because the BTR3-FiiO Bluetooth amp I got sounds even better than the N900).
I recently got a Pinephone, but it’s hard to enthuse about it. So much of the cool things you could go with the N900 – Emacs and the whole OS it brings along, writing your own scripts in the terminal – were due to its hardware keyboard. A modern smartphone that lacks a hardware keyboard is just a pain to hack.
It also lack a bunch of anti-features. No calling the mothership. No advertisements. No constant attempts to get me to register, to send gps information, to get me to do things which I don't want to do but the manufacturer do.
Interface is clean, fast enough, intuitive to use. It has the few apps I want to use like the terminal, fosdem schedule and also a virtual debian machine. All the third-party stuffs still get regular updates.
In the future I don't know what will replace it. The free software phones are interesting but I have my doubts about how practical they will be. On the proprietary side there are the foldables, but it is still a touch keyboard. There are feature phones, but many seems to now days be smartphones in disguise.
OK, but I hope you are aware that even the third-party stuff still uses the 2.6-version kernel and the system SSL libraries, which have not received security updates for years.
Also, an Android phone running LineageOS would not call the mothership, advertise to you, nag you to register (there is nothing to register for), send GPS information anywhere once you configure it to not do so (or you can choose a libre alternative like Mozilla’s location services), or get you to do things which you don't want to do but the manufacturer does. That is why many if not most idealistic N900 owners moved on to LineageOS, while hoping that something like the Neo900 or the Librem 5 or the Pinephone would eventually remove the need for Android entirely.