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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product.

The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?

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People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.

I see what you're saying. I guess I expect these sorts of things to suck.

> I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.

This is not at all consistent with my N9 experience.

But it was a disappointment in terms of not delivering source for a reproducible FOSS firmware a community could form around and iteratively improve, nor did they facilitate easily replacing the OS/distro.

If the N9 had the pinephone'seasily replaced 100% FOSS firmware via SD cards and community, we'd be in a very different place today.

I believe most of the source was available but maybe some stuff was missing. Same with the N900 which was also nearly unusable. I frankly liked the Blackberry style Nokias better (E63 etc.) and source for those would have been great.

> the [N9] or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.

Maybe you should have paid full price... ;) I believe the one you got had some defect.

I used a N9 (daily driver) for about 10 years (until I got a L5, actually...), and it wasn't especially slow (OK, the storage was slow for writes). Things started getting worse and worse due to the lack of SW updates (so no support for newer TLS versions for instance), but that is another story.

My N9 wasn't by any means slow, and to this day is my favorite phone.

I pulled it out last year and tossed my SIM in it for a month. It worked fine, though the battery is a bit weak.

I think the 3G networks in the US were all shut down now, so N9's won't work here any more. Also my N9 and N900 were both unbearably slow. No idea what you did to get yours to run faster, or maybe you're just more patient than me ;).

T-Mobile has yet to fully sunset 2G/3G support.

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