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Comment by koiueo | Hacker News Reader

Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned.

To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled.

Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar...

Gosh I miss that phone.

I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low).

By the time the software started showing its age: no banking apps, browser failing to display more and more modern sites...

I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.

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Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing.

I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great!

I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent camera. Nobody's made one yet, but I keep hoping. And yes, in a matter of weeks I'll have my Astro Slide from Planet Computers, but I have little doubt the form factor will still fall short of the dream of a truly pocket phone you can type decently well on.

The N9 was not Symbian though. What I read was that there was a serious management culture issue at Nokia. Even before Elop Meego efforts were seriously sabotaged by the Symbian camp (the N9 was significantly delayed for example) .

Mind you that memo and the decisions made were either incredibly stupid or part of a strategy by the shareholders to break apart Nokia. I mean apart from the fact that you tell the public that you don't believe in your product while selling it, they also decided to axe the Meego version N9 successor even though it was essentially ready. Many believe that was done to not risk it being a success, which would have revealed the whole strategy change to be wrong.

> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones.

I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now.

More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites for the game files (or pay exorbitant fees through magazines).

There was a certain charm to games back then, too, seeing what people could knock together with Java on such a limited platform. Games like Gravity Defied, Galaxy on Fire or Gish, or even Doom RPG.

I'm kind of nostalgic, admittedly, maybe for a time when not everything was so well optimized towards monetization. And before Wirth's law became so present on our devices.

The problem with Symbian was not the usability but the developer experience.

SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was designed for a Psion handheld (Uikon) and implementation for Psions (Eikon) and Series 60 UI implementation (Avkon) piled on top of that? Check. App architecture that doesn't really have a concept of standalone app but works on the idea that apps are views and controllers that handle files? Check. What about making every single phone model slightly different so that apps are not portable between Symbian phones by default but you have to actually test and port with every model? Check. And there was a lot more at deeper technical level that I never had to reach.

I understand that the developer experience was better for the last Symbian versions but at that point it was already late, iOS and Android were taking over and Symbian had a reputation to fix.

My definitive memory of Symbian development having a lunch at a Nokia cafeteria, a week after starting the job and all the dreams about having a computer in your pocket that could run anything as long at it didn't need huge amounts of CPU power, memory or screen area crushed, and complaining with a friend who was in similar situation. An older engineer had heard us, told us that we don't know anything about how bad S60 is and continued with a hour-long rant that as far as I know was all pure facts.

All true, and then there was also the schizophrenic S40 or S60 development too.

I was told by someone who had developed for both that S40 was much better for developers. Of course it was completely closed ecosystem except for J2ME apps so it didn't have much of future in competition with low end Android. I'd really like to know what Meltemi was like.

And a whole bunch of phoned under that s30

That you couldn't develop for at all.

All of that is true, and that's why Nokia acquired Trolltech: Qt solved all those problems on Symbian, and provided an easy, mostly OS-independent, way to rebuild the apps for Maemo/MeeGo.

I must live in simpler times then, with an iPhone from 2017 that has notifications set where I want them to be.

I do have a newer one, that's because the camera is something I care about, not because an X isn't fast enough or whatever, it remains a capable phone.

I get nostalgic for the HipTop, personally. Probably because I never had one, by the time I was done with flip phones the slab-o-glass was the obvious winner. Seriously cool little gizmos though, I don't think a better typing experience has been made for a pocketable jeejah to this day.

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck with the Mac and DOS/Windows duopoly since the 80s. The problem is a new platform isn’t just competing with the established OSes themselves, it’s also competing with the associated peripheral, software and services ecosystems. Those consist of thousands of companies providing thousands of products and services worth trillions of dollars. There’s just no way to get traction against that from a standing start.

> I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck

In-between Chromebooks and generic Linux distros (say what you will about the year of Linux on the desktop, use is only growing; slow paced or not, doesn't matter), specialised Linux distros (SteamOS - you might think it doesn't matter, it's only for a handheld console, the Steam Deck, but it will force many games to have Linux compatibility. And one of the main things keeping many tech savvy users on Windows is gaming) i think a duopoly is a bit of a strong word, and it's getting disrupted.

Oh sure, I was mainly addressing the current mobile OS landscape with the desktop as a historical case in point, but you're right. There have always been alternative options, especially for niche use cases. I think there are several things happening there right now. One is the erosion of the desktop as a native application platform, if you mainly only care about web apps then the desktop OS isn't an issue because the web is already a powerful platform.

The other is the advanced state of Windows emulation for games, you can bypass the platform effect if you can piggy back on an established platform's APIs. That's tricky though, plenty of mobile OSes tried to get traction with Android APK compatibility, but the problem with that is, why bother developing native apps for them? With games consoles it's a different situation, maybe emulation in the long term is just fine.

HarmonyOS is the only thing really new that I've seen , but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.

Um. HarmonyOS is literally just Android. It’s not even remotely new. There’s even. Android/Google copyright notices left in it.

This is exactly what Nokia were working on; the N9 ran Meego, a Linux-based OS Nokia had been developing for years. There had been a string of "internet tablets" (eg N800, N810) and phones (N900) running Maemo, a precursor to Meego. They even bought QT as part of the development!

Meego, running on the N9, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was smooth, fast, beautifully designed, and had simple elegant swipe-based navigation system, it had multiprocess app switching (AFAIK before iPhone OS did) and a brilliant newsfeed/notification system. It felt like it really had extraordinary potential. And Elop ditched it.

It really sounds it should have been given a chance. Did they ever open source it to give other Linux OS’ a chance?

Sailfish has been around for years and somehow still under active development.

My phone runs Debian (PureOS to be exact) and I'm perfectly happy with it.

What device do you use?

Librem 5

Linux and Nokia were at one point the Crown Jewels of Finnish tech. One still remains. Would’ve been a match made in heaven but I believe they needed Microsoft’s cash to keep the company running. I remember testing the N900 at their store and was really impressed but I think it was too little too late

N900 was awesome, but it wasn't what the masses wanted. It had a lot of quirks, like UI freezing when someone calls you so you couldn't answer the call and suffering from slowing down over a relatively short period of time while being price competitive with the other high end phones.

N900 was a great beta. We never got a 1.0 though.

The 1.0 was the N9. It had excellent reviews. Sadly it was commercially stillborn - Nokia had already publicly switched to Microsoft's bullshit, so it got no commercial push, and nobody wants to buy a dead phone.

Such a shame, I really wanted one but couldn't justify it.

Eventually got a Sailfish Jolla.

I really wanted the N900 and was ready to buy the next version. But it never came. By the time the N9 arrived it was already clear that it was dead.

Some of the bugs you describe could have been fixed with simple software updates.

Agreed. I loved my Nokia N9. The software was great! The Nokia N9 alarm clock was the best alarm clock app I've ever used.

Android have copied some elements of this but it's nowhere near as simple!

The hardware was fantastic as well. I dropped mine several times without a case and it never broke.

The TI dac sounded great with my Sony XBA-3 iems I had at the time.

I did hate the USB port cover though. And hated that they didn't have a dedicated camera button like the N8 and n97.

The N9 was a regrettable purchase for me. I even feel that Nokia owes me, all these years later!

Paid a lot for the 64 gig N9. Soon after Nokia abandoned the OS, and I felt ripped off.

I remember the flash refused to stay off. I would disable flash for a photo, but next time I used camera the flash was back on. This was enough to move to a phone that remembered the flash setting.

Years later I tried to start my N9 but it was demanding a password that I didn't know. Some kind of recovery password I never knew I had set up. There was no way I could find to reset the phone even to factory settings. It's basically bricked with no way to restore, so I couldn't even sell it as a working phone.

> Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned.

I'll counter with the Nokia N900.

> I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.

So say we all.

> I'll counter with the Nokia N900.

I've never understood this about N900 fans.

My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity.

What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?

The N900 was my favorite phone by far. Most of the reason come as a programmer, not all users might value them.

First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platforms suffer from.

I could simply write bash script for it to extend its functionality. For example I remember writing a script that would record and sent recordings of phone calls to my server.

I installed Pidgin the chat client and used it to chat with my friends when MSN was still popular in my county. It truly felt like having a PC in your pocket.

The keyboard was the best keyboard ever made in my opinion. I could actually type blind on it sensing a message without looking at the phone at all. I still own 3 N900's with the hope of every managing the find the enthusiasm to rig in the another phone or a pi.

But all this points also apply to the N9, it was a fully fleshed Linux system and arguably qt for writing apps was significantly more comfortable for developers than the custom framework based on gtk. I even recall that it was quite straight forward to port desktop apps, with very minor adjustments.

On top of that it was actually usable for normal users which the n900 failed at, largely due to not being usable in many networks due to the radio IIRC. The UI of the N9 was also much more polished. So unless you never used an N9 I don't understand how you would prefer the N900 (except for the keyboard).

> I don't understand how you would prefer the N900 (except for the keyboard)

The keyboard made it. It was very usable too. I took it once to a hackathon and was able to follow along nicely.

Totally agree!

I've had them all, including a Zaurus, various Palms with phone, various XDAs, Nokia N900, Free Runner, Firefox phone, Ubuntu phone, you name it... but IMHO the N900 was the best form factor and UI - the only reason why I got rid of it was the band didn't support where I was traveling to.

Still sad the NEO 900 went nowhere. I would jump at that. Still interested in trying the Purism and PinePhone, but with my time as limited as it is, I'll stick to my Pixel 4a running LineageOS for now - but can't wait to get me back a pure Linux phone that works without issues!

> I've never understood this about N900 fans.

> Or was there something else about it?

It's pretty simple: hacker vs. user points of view

i used both N9 and N900. N9 was a way more polished, user-centric device. I love the UX and even how the device looks

however, for (low-level) hackers, N9/N950 was a bit hostile environment compared to N900. The first major stumbling block was Aegis (somewhat similar to Samsung's Knox perhaps). With N900, you can just boot any other Linux by simply loading u-boot to memory using the flasher. Nothing else. N9/N950's Aegis prevented that kind of luxury, so you needed to mess with the OS first, deal with permanent ominous warranty warning, and risk bricking it (see https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81579). On the other hand, N900 is basically unbrickable. So N950 loses to N900 because of these reasons, even though it has a keyboard, a somewhat better one in fact

Yup, that's spot on. N9 felt good to use, but it was a disappointing device once you got used to the level of openness in a commercially supported product that N900 provided.

Still better than pretty much every alternative at that time though.

The physical keyboard was certainly nice, especially for a linux sysadmin / programmer. I also miss the camera, the "normal" and familiar Linux environment, the unified messaging (native XMPP support, with A/V calling!). It was sturdy despite the moving (keyboard) parts. Phone experience was decent, certainly better than my current Android, but can't beat my first phone, the Nokia 3310.

N900 was also the first phone with a full on browser capable of running any site. Other phones then were not able to run full JS. Also the resolution was higher than other phones.

> Here maps

HERE was spun off, and is a great platform today. HERE WeGo is available for Android and iOS, plus web.

Nokia transit / HERE transit was my favorite public transit app back when I used windows phone. It had a unique way [1] of presenting transit options that was far more convenient than the simple list that every other app does. Sadly the current HERE WeGo app also does the simple scrolling list, so I see no reason to use it.

[1] https://mspoweruser.com/nokia-here-transit-now-covers-46-uk-...

Oeffi presents transit options in the same way. Don't know if the style has a name.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....

Did you try the Jolla phones? They tried to carry the Meego torch in their Sailfish OS (which currently works well with "last year's" Sony phones). Even though it has different UI decisions than the N9 I found it reasonably good over time, and today some of it's decisions (like using swipes for navigation) made their way into other mainstream mobile OSes.

I bought the Xperia X and paid for Jolla with android support.

It's a horrible buggy mess. Nothing like the smooth experience of the meego/Maemo n9

Weird, I had an Xperia XA2 for a long time and it was the opposite, no bugs to speak of. Now with a Xperia 10 III it's still pretty good.

Aw man the N9, good times. I still rock my glossy white N9 from time to time. Just realized that thing had 64GB of storage in 2011.

That thing had also fully functional car navigation with all maps for free, and it had busybox shell... gosh how miserable are we now with smartphone options...

Lol, I had an N900 and it was clunky at best. It was ok as a tech preview, but it wasnt a fantastic product by any means.

The N900 did NOT run Meego. I agree with OP 100% that the N9 was an amazing phone. Honestly it was brilliant. Super smooth and well thought out. Polished too. With an android emulation layer on top it could have been a success. Alas Nokia got Elop’d.

How would Meego have succeeded where Windows Phone, which had Microsoft’s backing, failed?

Applications. You can't take an existing Windows app and run it on Windows Phone, because the APIs are not there. You can take an existing Linux app and run it on Meego, because it's just a regular ARM Linux with a custom UI.

Microsoft backing is a help? Seems to me having the backing of the Linux community would have been way better.

Making UI for mostly existing apps, porting lots of existing apps over. Lots of free continues investments. Like you get other companies on board who use the same basic distro and apps and help with bug fixes and so on.

You can use the same distro on phones, tables and even sell laptops with that software on it.

And you can do all of that for no cost to anybody. Every single Nokia with Windows gives money away to Microsoft.

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