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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used.

The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.

In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500, even though the design principles were pretty advanced for that time.

(I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop)

But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.

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Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult following for years after.

Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo after only a few months - either the stupidest move in history or result of internal power struggles - and force-marrying it with Intel's Moblin (itself a decent mobile OS) to create unholy mess that was Meego.

The book (btw awesome find, gonna read it at the first chance I get!) agrees with my recollection of the events:

> The operating system was named Maemo. As soon as it was permitted to be fitted on a phone, that first Maemo smartphone was a reasonable success. It attracted a community of open source developers who created Maemo apps. With 12,000 members, this was the largest mobile developer community in the world. Then Nokia did something remarkable. It partnered with the chip manufacturer Intel, and the two companies renamed Maemo to MeeGo.

Consider Maemo was Debian-based, using GTK, and Moblin was RedHat-based, using QT. It not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and repackage everything, it also threw all the thriving dev community under the bus.

Coincidentally, I was just reading something related to this debacle here - https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/177611 - too. And I do wonder how Nokia's future would have been different if they had fully focused on Meego / Sailfish OS instead of adopting Windows Mobile Platform. (Sailfish OS was developed by ex-Nokia developers).

> not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and repackage everything

this is half-correct. Maemo->Meego did shift from GTK to QT, but they kept the Debian packaging on the N9 (the only device to ship with Meego)

You're right, tho I believe that was only intended as a halfway step (so even more breakage, yay!).

Still better than Meego, which they discontinued like 8 months before releasing the N9, the first and last meego device.

Meego is Maemo + Moblin if I remember correctly. It's the frakenstein monster he's talking about

>The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.

I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)

In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony phone (maybe an M600c — the one from the James Bond film), while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time I thought, "The future is finally here!"

Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm...

At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

The Storm is quite infamous because it launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G.

Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.

At the time, it was much better for email if your backend was Exchange.

family plan was on verizon :(

Yes, but I was doing that on a 9110, I think. Had a decent terminal if I wanted to use telnet :)

Being at Nokia Networks during that last phase, I could observe in first person how many of those things went.

Nokia used to have internal shows to get employees feedback for future products, Maemo not having a radio modem was a common remark, naturally they couldn't add it due to Symbian.

Also think that Elop gets more blame than he deserves, as many see his connection to Microsoft and not the bonus from Nokia's own management board.

NetAct versus other networking products, also suffered from the same culture issues, by the way.

Even today NetAct remains a hot mess.

Looking back, the way OSS Middleware was supposed to reboot NetAct, was the wrong approach, we had better just rewrite everything in better C++ without the Perl/CORBA stuff, but many pieces were at play.

Not much else I can talk openly about it.

I appreciated the N900 (still have one), but Nokia caught my eye and then interest in the smartphone area before that, as I bought an E61 in an airport in Germany, while on my way back to the US. Once back to work I configured it as skinny (SCCP, actually) client to my Cisco CUCM, and amazed all my peers about being able to pick up my phone extension, over WiFi, on my cell phone. And then all the other things you could do with it ...

Out of interest I just had a look on eBay to see what Nokia 9500s go for and... wow. The answer is, kind of, proper money. As in, hundreds of pounds for unlocked models in good condition. Might not sound like that much in an era where premium flagship phones typically cost £1000-1500, but still pretty nuts for a phone that was released all the way back in 2004. I guess for a retro collector with the right sort of fetish this is reasonable[0].

[0] Btw, I'm absolutely not dissing this: I have my own fetish - something of a thing for old synths, particularly those of the early-ish digital era in the 80s that are still fairly affordable, and recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum machine... from Australia. It wasn't _that_ expensive, but it's a similar level of expenditure. I love old analogue synths too: I just can't afford them and, with these, because they're a bit more sexy and fashionable than the digital options, you can often pick up much less expensive modern day reproductions and homages.

The cosmo is a sort of attempt towards the communicators https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator

> 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.

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