The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t
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I attended an event with an "evangelist" here in Manchester, I was all fired up. It was some dude from Finland on a UK tour, and from the start it was all about the transition to QT on Symbian - this was to an audience full of people already working on iOS, to whom Symbian was a bad joke. He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty, but clearly it had just reached Finland or something. Maemo was a footnote, "oh yeah we have that too", it was absolutely clear he just didn't care for it - the future was QT on Symbian. People were snickering; I wanted to strangle him. I reckon he single-handedly destroyed any local interest in developing for Nokia. I gave up shortly afterwards, and then the burning-platform memo happened and that was it.
My N900 is now an mp3 player for my 9yo son. The MicroUSB-B socket is a bit loose, iirc that was common with early adopters of that standard. The backlit keys have yellowed, or maybe the LEDs have. Everything else still works fine, although the software is obviously obsolete. My kid wonders why he has to press the screen that hard, and I feel like someone trying to explain ancient history.
What a waste, Nokia, what a waste.
From what I remember this was because they'd spent so much time and effort building up the maemo (or meeGo or whatever) and burned up so much goodwill with the switch to Qt. When the burning platform memo came out they'd literally just burned another platform, regardless of technical merit the timing for moving to Qt couldn't have been worse.
Elop was a truly successful Nokia saboteur. An illustrative case study of how a single CEO can destroy a company for his self-profit and go out laughing with no legal repercussions.
Elop did exactly what the Nokia board asked him to do.
All anti-Elop bashers should read about what happened before spreading this content.
> A Finnish newspaper has uncovered information in the SEC filings for Nokia's sale to Microsoft that show former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had a huge incentive to unload the company in the form of a $25.5 million US bonus that he would get in the event of a "change of control" in the mobile company.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stephen-elop-to-get-25-5m-f...
Followed by Tomi T Ahonen posts,
During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%, their mobile phone market share was halved, their smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company suffered a cumulative €4.9 billion loss
I happened to be in Espoo office during the week the memo came out, to give a training on NetAct related technologies.
No research needed.
If they had set full sail on Maemo, it would have been the 3rd platform today.
The community was already getting tired of the multiple Symbian reboots (just IDEs there were three of them), then came PIPS and Qt, while it seemed like a strecht everyone was kind of still on boat.
However then the whole Linux vs Symbian started to gain steam, Symbian went open source, and finally the burning platforms memo happenend.
Not many happy faces at Espoo during that week, and even more unhappy devs asked to throw everything away and jump into .NET, when the Nokia community had a long tradition of Java and C++ development stacks.
Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.
I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.
The reason for this was of course not technical - the Symbian folks inside Nokia simply managed to convince the executive level management that adding mobile data would turn these devices from PDAs to a smartphones, and it would be very ill-advisable to launch a competing smartphone platform to Symbian.
When Maemo folks finally got a chance to "give us a try" (and I guess management saw with the competition that they needed something more modern), the result was N900. Considering it was meant as a "niche" device its sales exceeded all projections. However, in the grand scheme of things it was just an experiment designed to fail and further cement the dominance of Symbian.
I think Nokia also developed a fully-working tablet around either Maemo or MeeGo. It was literally ready to ship, but was at last minute cancelled before the launch event due to backroom dealing again by the Symbian folks.
It has all been documented in the book "Operation Elop", which paints a pretty good picture about everything that went on behind the scenes during the demise of the once great Nokia: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ The book is based around absolutely exclusive interviews of people who served in Nokia's board and top executive positions at the time.
It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as in Symbian.
The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the platform was bump in the road.
(I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++, so performance on this type of devices was problematic. Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit weird given the long history of Gtk.)
The issue with QT was all about Nokia: QT was supposed to save the Symbian platform, and also provide an on-ramp to Maemo (at least in theory - in practice nobody was really committed to that...). So the Maemo folks were obligated to switch to QT, which they did fairly easily; the result was what shipped on the N9, effectively Maemo 6 ("Harmattan") rebranded as "MeeGo 1.2".
In short: QT was adopted to please the Symbian people, and it was all for nothing anyway. That suited me just fine when first announced (Hildon was an under-documented mess of C with obsolete and unusable Python bindings, whereas QT had first-class wrappers like PyQt), but many Maemo old-timers never really warmed to it.
The MicroUSB socket was a weak point, the fix was to file off the two notches on microUSB cables before using them with the N900. So my N900's USB socket is still good as new.
That should be a whole post by itself.
Ironically the best mobile platform for hacking GUI and mobile apps in Python now is, er, iOS. Pythonista gives access to almost the entire iOS API suite (and slightly hacky access to all of it), even has a GUI builder built-in, and is highly programmable directly on the device. Pyto is pretty cool too. Hard to believe, but that's where we are.
The sad thing is, I remember attending a PyConUK about 10 years ago where this was a clear item in the keynote (by Van Lindberg, iirc): "the Python story on mobile is non-existent". Everybody agreed it was a priority.
There are non-python dev environments that enable the same thing, like Codea that uses Lua. It has several published apps and games out there on the App Store as well.
It was completely off my radar, clearly - it could use more publicity then...
Frankly the options on Android look extremely primitive in comparison, and largely depend on off-device development for anything above very basic and incomplete terminal prompt level features. iOS on-device development went beyond that with commercial-grade on-device development environments a decade ago, but Android seems stuck there permanently.
I'm not really sure why that is, there doesn't seem to be any technical limitation preventing the emergence of well specified complete development environments, like Codea, Pythonista and Pyto on Android but it never seems to happen. When I got my first iPad I was half expecting to have to get an Android device eventually just to be able to code on it, but it never happened and the on-device development story on iOS has gone from strength to strength.
I had the exact same experience with RIM/Blackberry 957-era... Great device, completely clueless company regarding an independent software ecosystem.
Say what you will about Apple, but they truly knocked down walls and opened the mobile floodgates to independent developers.
They picked my proposal along with a couple others and gave us some budget to buy hardware and components, and about 3 or 4 weeks to complete the project. It was my first time soldering, first time using an Arduino, and I remember being so stressed out about whether or not it would work.
It all came together in the end and looking back with hindsight now, I really owe a lot to that competition and the phone that let me pretty quickly write python apps on it :) Good times.
The N900 was different. I didn't understand everything I was doing, but installing deb's, overclocking a CPU, installing Android v2.x, installing emulators, browsing forums for more tinkering (I could go on) was the thing that made me love computers more.
Last but not least, it had a killer feature any fresh 18-year-old with friends that had cars loved back then: FM transmitter!! Back when AUX inputs were still a rarity and bluetooth was pairing... pairing... pairing... just pressing a button and tuning to a channel to get crystal clear audio was AMAZING. That and the IR blaster made for some nice party tricks.
However, in retrospect not all was rosy. Advocates of Linux phones today would prefer to avoid binary blobs that make upgrades impossible (the N900 is forever stuck on kernel 2.6) and a cellular modem connected directly to main memory.
Why not just tape it in place?
It still works with a few websites like this one. In fact, I'm using my N9 to post this comment :-).
Like you said it was a fantastic little linux terminal - great for SSH and it was certainly fun and novel to have a linux CLI on my cell phone.
That's good, because that isn't true. Rapuyama has its own 128MB of DRAM on the N900.
or maybe the n900 had less esoteric peripherals than android phones. I don't know... as I never got my hands on one despite actively trying to buy one for a couple years when they were announced.
There is a lot of information on the net why that's not the case, from the GPU architecture to source leaks. One could possibly make a shim to load older proprietary kernel modules, but it's hardly worth it: PowerVR GPUs don't seem to be used much nowadays, in contrast with Mali GPUs. And PowerVR GPUs seem to require quite different drivers depending on IP customization.
That has been done already: https://github.com/openpvrsgx-devgroup
Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990-2020.
Apparently when the iPhone was announced the whole company was in deep shock and disarray. They were planning on the first touchscreen phones hitting the market around 2010-2015, and here was a company promising to deliver one by 2008.
Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone.
BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd dislocated the screen.
Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before Samsung arrived.
Webpage would render incredibly slowly because Blackberry weren't capable of putting a wifi chip in the handset (it was limited to edge if I recall). The whole UI was sluggish. Cherry on top? No apps. There was a way to write apps but it was pretty much a unique SDK per phone model. No app store of course.
It hit the market a few months after Apple revealed the iPhone 3G and the App Store.
Remember their 'haptic' touchscreen tech, SurePress? Click Clack. Felt like a child's toy. Quite the departure from genuinely great stuff like the trackball/pearl.
But it did have apps. Just not many. I remember downloading Pandora, Shazam and Whatsapp from the Blackberry App store. Android and iOS stores obviously dwarfed it in terms of quantity though.
Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later.
It’s really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long time. iPhone is just a magical product.
At the time though, the iPhone was questionable for a business user on paper. Weird touch keyboard, poor security (its active sync client lied about encryption), etc.
But in the flesh, it was magical.
It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.
They were tripped up by their own success as the 800 lb gorilla of dumb phones that sold in the hundreds of millions.
Nokia had a seperate department for “renewing the company through innovation”. It was an internal incubator which reported directly to the CEO. It could scout for tech, and develop prototype product products.
The problems started at the point where a new product was ready to leave the incubator. It had to be “sold” to an existing business unit in a suitable division.
The hurdle was that pre-2007 Nokia divisions were raking in billions selling mature tech in enormous volumes through existing channels.
There was no room and few candidates to champion anything new which required nurturing, development, ancillory technology and marketplaces, or, heaven forbid, new business models, starting from a revenue base of $0.00.
Seriously, the device was just so attractive both for users and programmers. If Nokia were able to stay the course, they could pull off a bestseller.
Their nosedive into the ground under Stephen Elop is a stuff of dark legends.
The first maemo tablets did not have radio to avoid competion with Symbian, and devices like S90, for example.
Their fate was by no means foreordained and someone different from Stephen Elop (say, Tim Cook?) would have different results.
When this was out I was using the OG Motorola Droid. I wanted one of these but they were not available on my carrier so I stayed on the Droid line. The hot-dog slide keyboard was amazing. I had full terminal control from these.
Nowadays I actually still rock a 2017 iphone SE; dimensions wise I don't want anything bigger in width or height, but i would gladly add some thickness to get a full tactile keyboard again.
I'm not sure why you haven't been able to get a review unit of the new Pro1-x model, but I'll get in contact with someone at f(x)tec for you.
However, it's also a painful memory, because I managed to brick the device after spending possibly hundreds of hours customizing it.
The first thing I did was let the micro USB port come loose--a common problem with the device, which seemed to happen to many over time. I remember still being able to charge it somehow (maybe I bought an external charger?). However, the nail in the coffin was when I was cleaning up some "unnecessary" cruft in the init directory, ostensibly to make the thing boot faster.
What I discovered instead was that there was a watchdog that monitored for the existence of crucial files, and, failing to find them, the phone would reboot itself. So my glorious N900 was caught in a bootloop, and moreover without a functioning USB port to re-flash the operating system.
Behind the battery, there are CPU pins that are directly exposed through a grid of copper pads. I made an attempt at wiring up a makeshift soldering job directly to the pins corresponding to a USB port, but failed to confidently pull off the dexterity to work with the small surface, as well as the care to do so without heating things up too much.
Of course I believe there existed a development device with pins that directly clamped onto the pads, but if such a thing was publicly available it was probably hard to come by at affordable prices.
I later tried to realize a similar experience to the N900 on Android using stuff like tmux and F-Droid. However, I have no good memories of any phone after my Nokia, and pretty much don't like phones at all at this point, and now just use my iPhone SE as a glorified flip phone with maps and a web browser.
Genuinely regretting that now.
I don't want bionic with Surface Flinger. Give me a Wayland compositor and a normal Linux stack.
That's exactly what the Librem 5 is about - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
A regular wlroots-based Wayland compositor and regular GNU/Linux apps made adaptive to various screen sizes :)
There's also the PinePhone which is much cheaper because of its lower-end hardware and the fact that its price doesn't include software development.
What drift?
Nokia had actually done the groundwork for a fair bit of MMS support and they were really helpful with answering questions (they even shipped a list of access point names in PR1.2 to make fMMS much easier to set up)... But yepp, I ended up working at Nokia afterwards :D
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)
There was also a project to replace the hardware:
When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet. That kind of thing is another reason to support efforts like pmOS.
Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And then they pivoted to the Intel partnership just like that, from one day to the next, which meant jettisoning a massive amount of effort from the community (deb to rpm, effectively abandoning Qt, etc).
It was really a strange relationship. They kept writing rivers of (digital) ink on their love for OSS and blablabla, but then took all major decisions behind closed doors.
A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our collective understanding of this improved even within the last few years (e.g., community development processes like Rust's).
(Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might also be forgetting things that people used to know -- repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way, and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier community foresee and avoid at the time.)
It was really hard moving to android as I missed the swiping to navigate the OS.
Now Apple is using swiping and all the cool kids think it's cool again. But like any good hipster I can tell you I was doing it before it was cool.
Lately the "main" button has been failing, and since tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep anymore, I can't pick up calls anymore. So to access the phone, I get out the SIM and re-insert it.
It's time to abandon it here too, but it was an excellent phone in use for almost 10y.
> since tapping the screen doesn't get it out of sleep anymore, I can't pick up calls anymore.
Mine will show the the screen and prompt me to swipe up to answer the call. Does yours work in a different way, or is the touch system failing?
I'm now more thinking about continuing that using AndroWish [2] instead (Tcl/Tk on Android).
My N9 in better times did exactly that when someone called, but now the screen stays black and nothing reacts (it still rings though). I don't know what causes this, because out of the sleep mode then touchscreen works fine. I have to pull out the SIM everytime as such, put it back in and log back into the network (and then often call back myself ofcourse ;)). Not going to bother anymore, but I suspect a software problem. It also started to crash/hang it's applications from time to time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Mer
I think we have Stephan Elop to thank for that. I never really understood why Nokia didn't just focus on the market outside the US. Had they continued producing phones like the N9, I'm sure they could have retained a lot of market share in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
> I would still be using it if the CAs hadn't expired
I'm not sure whether all of the CAs had expired, but I wonder if it would be possible to get an updated package with up to date CAs. The main issue I have is that it can't negotiate an agreed upon cipher when trying to establish a TLS connection.
I'm still able to use the Firefox browser to browse a number of websites like Facebook and Reddit. Hacker news still works with the built-in browser. Facebook sometimes works with the default browser and the old subdomain reddit website will lock up the default browser in my experience (the current reddit website layout is a no-go).
* Commodore Amiga
* Psion PDAs
* Nokia N900
* Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone)
All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dustbin because of business issues.
1. The burning platform thingy happened when Nokia was absolutely dominating Brazillian smartphone market, people had even ported Counter-Strike to Symbian! Then suddenly it was dead, and didn't even get replaced by iPhone as the memo predicted, instead it got replaced by chinese no-name phones (until the government got annoyed and banned them outright... if you use a imported phone, cell towers can kick it out of the network)
2. Nokia abandoned all their business here for some years.
3. Nokia is now back, but all they do is half-hearteadly sell some crappy androids, they KaiOS market is booming in India, and has much potential in Brazil, but they refuse to sell KaiOS phones here, and you can't import them (because they get kicked out of the network by the cell towers), meanwhile local companies are making crappy KaiOS phones and doing reasonably well.
The same couldn't be said for N900 or N9, at least for me. J1 was rather slow but good enough, Xperia X was great for a year or so until Android 4.4 got churned, and now with Xperia XA2 and Xperia 10, we are finally there.
What strikes me is the love and admiration for a product that proudly can claim that was from the very start. Privileged to be part of that diverse "mutant" team made by Ari, Ansi, Raouf and Yannick. Ideologically satisfied that we supported open-source projects and financed their development.
At the same time, Im also curious why no one talks if a security framework was designed to protect the privacy, of billions, of consumers. Or if the EU was ready to offer digital protection by investing in companies and the relevant ecosystem. Bottom line, the issue was never simple, was very complex and multidimensional, perhaps geopolitical at the core. Take for example the Huawei case, Finland is too important to the west to be embarrassed in the same way. So complex environment to explain that an Elop needed to clear the mess, take the blame and move on.
For me the outcome had positive effects, Finland became a startup nation. All Meego employees evolved their careers in global companies. I dare to claim that Microsoft adapting Linux was caused by the infusion of Meego people through the acquisition.
So be happy that you were part of a profound change, as fans or contributors.
The key question now that I have for you. What is the next step beyond Meego, Jolla? How Gnu/Linux can make a comeback into mass-market commercial products? How a 150-year-old company such as Nokia can benefit from that? How consumers can benefit from Linux products? What is the evolution of Linux in relation to AI? How the related communities and fans can be united to create new business models and services?
Bottom line, instead of being nostalgic, let’s use our passion to create something new. Please accept my intellectual challenge and engage by offering answers.
Surely, being nostalgic is making me depressed when thinking about the lost opportunities.
Im here and available for something new and big. So please inspire me with new ideas!
I used the N800 until the battery eventually failed.
It was amazingly liberating, as a 'computer person', to have a truly hand-held computer; all my friends and family thought it was a stupid toy with a hard-to-understand interface -- but they liked drawing on it.
(I had the N800 first, and got the N900 when it came out)
In broad strokes, for increasingly complex work, there is an inverse relationship between the portability and the productivity of a computing device.
This is particularly true for types work that involves mentally integrating and generating large (for the human mind) amounts of information like code - but also for reviewing documents, managing financial accounts (interacting with a large spreadsheet on a phone is a nightmare).
It's why at the end of the day, most engineers and architects (whether in software or real engineers in the physical realm), get most of their work done in front of large screens with full size keyboards (or at least large laptops).
This isn't to say that there aren't niche use cases or circumstances where a Linux computer in your pocket isn't extremely useful - the example always rolled out being "remote administration" of a server - but even these tend to be exceptions. It's nearly always better to accomplish remote administration tasks from a laptop.
My only real quibble with the N900 on that level is that "|" wasn't on the keyboard and involved a double keypress and a screen touch to get to.
Even while at a conference and doing conference-y things like modifying, giving, or reviewing presentations, a bigger screen and keyboard are pretty indispensable.
I own (still) an N800 and an N810. Though I haven't picked up either in a while, I thought they were nifty devices at the time, and should pick them back up again. I still think they have a lot going for them. (The N800 was actually the first mobile navigation system I ever used, with an external Bluetooth GPS and software based on OpenStreetMaps.)
I was unable to find an N900 anywhere when it was new. I was met with pretty much blank stares.
Eventually, an online vendor got some refurbished N900s in stock at a good price. I ordered one, got it, plugged it in overnight to charge...
...and in the morning, it was totally dead. I emailed the vendor and asked for an exchange because, you know, one bad one out of the bunch, they were refurbs anyway, no problem.
The vendor wrote back and told me that they had received a batch of 28 of them. ALL the ones they got had some sort of problem that resulted in a return, they would not be getting any more of them, and if I sent it back they'd give me a refund.
Thus ended my N900 experiment.
It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.
I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those screens felt!
Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.
I'm going to have to call this subjective, because, surprisingly, I've also used capacitive screens.
I could use the N900 wet and in gloves, and it was pressure sensitive. Also, I once dropped it so hard that it broke a tiny piece of the sidewalk off (I tried to catch it while it was falling, and instead batted it and added velocity to the fall.) The screen was fine. I've never seen a cracked N900 screen.
The only time it required a stylus is when I was using a desktop UI on it, making everything microscopic. If you did that with a capacitive screen it would require a special stylus, whereas with my N900, a toothpick would do.
For capacitive screens you instead have to add another digitizer layer by wacom or n-trig to be able to draw, which took a while and still is not common enough. That said, bad quality resistive screens were much, much more frustrating to use than bad capacitive screen.
IIRC lack of multitouch was a software problem. The N900 was rife with software problems. If they had just kept the Linux orthodox and left out the binary blobs, they would have been able to go back to the platform after the MS disaster with the OS looking and working 10x better than where they left it.
It's interesting now to think I had this with me 24/7 for months and it didn't change my life at all. Same with the Palm V I owned before it. All the exciting ideas were there in the zeitgeist (portable general purpose computer in my pocket! ubiquitous instant access to information!) but the technology couldn't realize them yet.
Elop was a Microsoft employee who never stopped being a microsoft employee. As fake ceo of nokia he convinced the board to switch to microsoft OS and drop their success. Nokia did that and then when Nokia sales plummetted to disasterous level he proposed selling that division to Microsoft at quite the discount. Afterall who wants to buy a failing division. 11,000 employees laid off because of Elop's incompetence.
What the board should have done was fire Elop very publicly and move right back to the Linux ecosystem. They had a leg up to basically be what Pinephone, chinaphones, and so many other phones are trying to be.
Source: my company's WiFi was 64 characters, and the one employee with an N900 couldn't connect :)
Although I feel like the GPD MicroPC might be of more interest to the type of person who would have gone for a N900. It's a bit smaller than the Pocket 2 that they linked to, while at the same time having a better port selection - https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc
Running a browser on it was doable, but the bit that really became a blocker for me was the lack of a fast, simple e-mail client (even non-touch screen Blackberries were better, and had slightly better keyboards).
I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in many respects of course, but its interface was elegant, consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful.
I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking that you didn't need one. And boy did it show.
Also, terrible battery life.
So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead.
Some fun facts about Maemo:
Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based browser and was based on Debian. You could build your own packages, add your own apt repositories, and people basically built most of Debian from source to run on it. E.g. I had a JVM running on it and a full LAMP stack at some point.
The N800 was for a time the only device that could run Android (dual boot) and basically shared large parts of the kernel with it. Google used this device for early Android testing and probably owes a lot to Nokia engineers contributing patches to the Linux kernel. The first Nexus phone shipped quite late in the Android development process.
Development of Meego saw several strategy changes that ultimately delayed products for a long time. One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT; effectively retiring all of the user facing UI. That set back the clock by years. And it got slowed down further by a simultaneous attempt to get Symbian on QT as well. That trainwreck of course ended up sucking up all the resources and failed to ultimately deliver the goods. This was in the middle of Nokia's realization that "oh fuck this iphone thing is real; we need a touch screen UI". It killed at least two touch screen platforms that it had before it came to that realization.
Technically, the N800 was running circles around the first iphone in terms of what you could do on it. All it needed was a bit of hardware polish and a phone stack. Early Android had nothing on Meego. Even the UX was clumsy and it was slow and limited as well. But unlike Meego, Google shipped it and supported it and persisted in developing it. Nokia instead threw out the baby with the bathwater betting on several other horses before ultimately walking away from the whole phone business.
Nokia declined to combine a phone stack + SIM card with the N770 and N800 deeming it to risky; they were protecting their deals with operators to basically cripple phones in favor of crappy operating services. E.g. bundling Skype with the n800 was controversial. It even did video calls with Skype. In 2007. The N800 was a tablet before the iphone, ipad or Android were a thing. There was not a lot else in the market at that point. That thing with a phone stack would have been a killer product despite its many limitations.
The N900 and the later N9 were both labelled as developer phones and cut off from any serious marketing effort. The N9 technically was a decent phone but by the time it shipped, the team had been layed off, the platform cancelled and Nokia was endorsing Windows Phone. It also shipped an Android phone around the same time, leaving the ugly job of cancelling that product to Microsoft after the acquisition.
Samsung's Bada is a direct decendent of Meego. It never really gained any market share against Android and it seems Samsung pretty much gave up on it.
I remember seeing Bada phones at the time, but (at least in my country) the "does it run WhatsApp" era was already starting, and the total lack of apps for Bada made it totally unattractive.
All said, I am not sure that polishing and marketing would have been enough to save the situation. I didn't see Palm's Pre and webOS mentioned in the thread so far: that makes for an example of an excellent platform, with good marketing and capabilities, that still didn't manage to affect the rise of the duopoly.
That would have been a true flagship phone around 2011 with a 12 megapixel camera, aluminium body and nice touch screen. I had it in Symbian form and it was alright but ultimately meh in terms of software. Essentially all Android phones at that point were a combination of slow, not very premium, and riddled with bugs. This was way before Google figured out how to do software updates properly.
A slick UI, linux, touchscreen, etc. exactly what Nokia needed at that point. But they convinced themselves Symbian was good enough and were corrected by the market that made it very clear that it wasn't even close. Of course crippling the device with not enough memory did not help. Nokia saved pennies and sacrificed market share with that.
It's almost hilarious that modern Nokia HMD makes phones now because I expect the company to randomly up and disappear and come back with a WebOS phone or some other weird offshoot.
That was kind of swings and roundabouts, though. The second version of the Maemo app I worked on ended up being a major rewrite Gtk->Qt thanks to the switch, but Qt was so much better.
https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/
> PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well – but we’re still waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this month
There are pictures as well.
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what