Hacker News Reader

Originally the N8 was going to run Meego. The N8 should have been a flagship phone running Linux. Instead they chickened out and and went with Symbian instead; pretty late in the development process.

I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a few pixels to show a clock.

But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead of a capacitive one (which Apple used).

Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward form factor) and the only device that could have been great, the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help either.

Then windows phone started happening and and they unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up in that particular round (despite never having worked in that department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware and software engineers in recent history.

Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company. Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that followed worked out.

I still belief Elop was a MS trojan horse to somehow get the Nokia phone devision to Microsoft. The whole "burning platform" memo together with hamstringing the N9 which was a great phone (I used one until the battery died some day) and OS (maybe we would not have this IOS/android duopoly if Nokia would have really pushed Meego), it all seemed incredibly unprofessional and more like the actions of someone competitor not what the CEO would do.

He was appointed by a Nokia board looking to sell the business to MS. He was a patsy. Most of the bad decision making happened before Elop. And they appointed him to finish the job. The fault lies with the Nokia management and the board, including their former CEO, Jorma Ollila.

If you want to go to politics, the sad reality is that Elop was neither a Trojan horse nor even the thing/person that killed Nokia. What is true is that Nokia was managed as an amalgamation of internally competing departments. The board and the C-level managers (already way before Elop) saw this as a good thing, or at least were too meek to stand up to the department heads. So when the Symbian team did everything it could to harm Maemo/MeeGo (maybe because they saw it as a direct threat to their job security), nobody understood this was massively hurting Nokia as a whole and not serving their customers.

What's more, even if somebody did understand this, any concerns would have fallen on deaf ears as Nokia also had a culture of corporate arrogance. It saw itself as too big & successful to fail. They could make whatever mistakes, but it was alright because they could always revisit and make better decisions later. I don't think they fully realized how wrong they were even years after the Android/iOS duopoly had already solidified - considering how immense amounts of money they kept spending (under M$) in trying to bootstrap the Windows Phone ecosystem that was always destined to fail.

It was capacitive touch. The catch was it was not bonded to the lcd like more modern smart phones are. This meant that it was a 5 minute job by a smart 13 year old to replace the digitizer without needing to replace the lcd.

I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such.

Ah true, I forgot about that. The N8 was one of the first devices where they fixed that.

Not sure where your information that n8 was supposed to run Meego comes from, but I remember working with the Nokia s60 team already early 2009 and they were using n8 protos at the time. It’s definitely possible that there were two parallel projects though.

On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI elements were designed to be small. Only after they completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS Meego) it could have worked on the N8.

That would have been around the time when they should have launched a successor to the N800, which launched in 2007. As I recall, the n8 was originally designed to be that.

Meego/maemo had several UI redesigns. The issue was that Nokia just kept ripping it apart instead of just fixing it. The reason for the pen was resistive screens. Bigger buttons would have been an OK solution. The later n900 had the same issue. Ultimately, they bought QT to fix Symbian and then made the Meego team switch to that. They wasted years on the UI. Jolla emerged out of the ashes of that and is still around. Samsung's Bada is another descendant.

As other's have already mentioned, Symbian traces it routes back to the early Psion Organisers, which ran a pre-emptive multitasking operating system before Windows did, and was thought to be Microsoft's biggest competitor back then [1]. I've used the Psion II, and had a 3a, which you could program in their basic-like OPL language. The 5mx looked like Win95 in a palmtop and was a great pocket computing device with a reasonable keyboard, terminal, email client and internet connectivity. I remember back in 1998 or so looking longingly at the expensive phones that came with a built-in modem (Nokia 6210 and Ericsson R320 from memory), so I could use email and web on the go. Nokia took EPOC and became the lead in the Symbian consortium, using it on spiritual successors of the Psions - the 9300 and 9500, and when the E90 came out with a magnesium case and built in keyboard I had to get one.

That was in 2007, around the time of the first iphone, but was so much more capable. Incredible at that time having all that power in your pocket. I never got lost in foreign cities because I could just get a GPS lock on the train station and find my way back, without using very expensive data in a foreign country. It was a strange thing being able to access the internet anywhere back then. In some ways it was a better time - social media networks hadn't cottoned on to the ability to deliver dopamine from the pockets of world's population, so the device felt powerful, but not like a ball and chain, or distraction-device like my pixel does these days.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/why-is-bill-gates-so-scar...

Got a lot of nostalgia seeing OPL being mentioned…

Twenty years ago my grandfather gave me his old Psion 3c. To a curious 10-year-old, the novelties of a world clock, spreadsheet and diary grew old after a few hours — but OPL caught my imagination…

Here I am now, two decades later, programming professionally full time as a startup founder — all thanks to a dinky little BASIC-like language on a pocket organizer from the early 90s :)

I also had a Nokia N8. The UI was absurdly bad compared to iPhone at the same price.

It's not obvious in Nokia's carefully crafted screenshots, but the N8 UI was very static, slow, and unfriendly to touch actions. It was fundamentally designed around menu navigation on phone keypads. That's not something you can simply fix by making the menu items touchable instead of using arrow keys, yet that's basically what Nokia tried to do.

Besides the awful UI, it missed several key third-party apps that Android and iOS had. Also the GMail integration was pretty bad.

It's funny how the top two comments on this article are (1) yours, talking about how far ahead of its time this phone was, even compared to modern phones in 2022 and (2) another post from a Nokia engineer talking about how frustratingly limited Symbian was thanks to cooperative multitasking, etc.

Of course, both are simultaneously true.

As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an open computing platform.

I had no idea that it even had an FM transmitter and support for composite video as well as HDMI. Thank you for sharing that.

Symbian wasn't actually limited to cooperative multitasking. The kernel certainly supported preemptive multitasking, and apps could use multithreading if they wanted to. The POSIX threads API was available too.

However since everything in Symbian was designed first and foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the framework actively recommended against use of threads. Instead they asked you to schedule things on the app's main thread which gave the framework more control over when to run your callbacks. This wasn't a terrible idea at all, but the implementation of this system as a C++ multiple inheritance contraption was pretty confusing as I recall.

CActiveScheduler ran your CActive::RunL(), IIRC

> That's why we should support them or else we will continue walking backwards.

I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to participate in some parts of society. Talking to people, banking, food delivery, parking, public transport...

Linux on the desktop was similar to that in early 2000's: hardware, software and services were frequently not compatible. The IE monopoly made things even worse. Pioneers suffered, there are still some problems, but the landscape changed drastically because of those people. Some pioneers must be willing to change the world and pay the price for that.

In short, be the change you wish to see in the world. If you want there to be a viable competitor to Chrome, use Firefox. If you want there to be a viable competitor to Apple and Google (and you have the cash), buy a Librem 5. The alternatives are out there, begging to be used.

As an active developer in a programming language with a small ecosystem, I scream this to the clouds all day: great software doesn't become well-supported until somebody has the gall to use it.

> If you want there to be a viable competitor to Apple and Google (and you have the cash), buy a Librem 5.

No thank you, I will never buy or use any hardware from Purism. They are openly hypocritical and I have zero trust for them.

Quoting from: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...

> The RYF has a “secondary processor” exclusion that can be granted on a case by case basis. We will leverage this exclusion to load and train the DDR PHY on the i.MX 8. We will use a secondary processor to keep binary blobs out of u-boot and the kernel.

Add extra silicon, to lock the user out of updating the firmware. Because the FSF will grant you an arbitrary badge of honour if the firmware is closed source, but not user-updatable. This is some next-level bullshit.

This is on top of the hardware being utter crap in terms of protecting user security or privacy; marcan_42 explains it quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30761886

If you want a reasonable trade-off between freedom and security, GrapheneOS is actually the only viable contender I'm aware of.

> If you want there to be a viable competitor to Chrome, use Firefox.

The IE monopoly was broken, because Mozilla made a better product. Also, it took Chrome to fully displace IE.

This is why FOSS can't "win". You have to have a better product, not just a feel-good badge. Look at the FOSS projects out there that are actually successful: they all have a good product strategy behind them. But for most FOSS activists, designing a better product is apparently much harder than indoctrination.

Keep in mind I was spitballing. Don't take the Librem example too seriously- I didn't know about that stuff, and it certainly changes the way I view Purism.

> This is why FOSS can't "win".

I'm not really sure what "win" means in this context. If "winning" is what Chrome is doing right now, I don't want Firefox to "win" either. Competition is good.

If your argument here is that FOSS can't produce a "better" product, Firefox is as much a counterpoint now as it was when it broke the IE hegemony. For the user, it's just as good as Chrome. It even provides some features Chrome doesn't have (for example, popping out videos and actually-good ad block). Nobody cares about how chrome is 50% (i.e. 0.8ms) faster at responding to thing X.

> Don't take the Librem example too seriously- I didn't know about that stuff, and it certainly changes the way I view Purism.

This is the problem. You advise on something, but you barely look beneath the surface.

> If "winning" is what Chrome is doing right now, I don't want Firefox to "win" either. Competition is good.

Please take a good look at what Mozilla has been busy with, this past decade or so.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-asses... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/12/mozilla-mourns-microsoft/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/06/09/mozilla-responds-to-firef... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

All this happened while Firefox struggled to modernise the rendering engine, introduce process isolation, address stability and performance issues... Yes I know Quantum eventually delivered on these - but it was too little, too late, and still isn't great.

The only reason Mozilla is still alive, is because Google is throwing money at them - to avoid too much attention from regulators looking at Chrome's market share.

> Nobody cares about how chrome is 50% (i.e. 0.8ms) faster at responding to thing X.

I care. Just put it on any older hardware. Like my 2012 Thinkpad (3rd gen i5; OpenBSD), or my partner's 2017 MBP (infamous for its poor thermal design), running Firefox on either is a miserable experience compared to Iridium (Chromium fork) or Safari. The hardware is still pretty good for our needs.

Don't get me wrong: I dislike Chrome just as much as you do. I want to like Firefox, and I do agree with Mozilla's stated goals and values. But I won't (and wouldn't advise anyone to) personally suffer over this, in fact doing so is doing Mozilla a disservice - they need to get the message, fix their act, and deliver a better product; rather than blowing cash on CEO bonuses, sealing deals to screw their users, or engaging in planet-incinerating ponzi schemes.

> linuxphones

A hacker friend of mine carries around his pixel, which he has set up to use DAS KEYBOARD (ohne buchstaben) as his Linux development workstation.

This is a wonder to see, honestly. Truly a cyberpunk scenario out there on the edge of linuxphones.

Apropos, I flunk out with my PinephonePro+KB setup, which doesn't work nearly as well as his rig. Grr, power management "last 1%" ..

Yeah, the fact that we call iphone/android smartphones is kind of triggering. Especially in the early days they represented the dumbest phones imaginable, with the only saving grace having a better app-store to try and make up for it.