Reminder whenever this comes up that the Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago.
No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.
No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.
All my horses on this being the #1 reason why Microsoft panicked and pushed Nokia into a partnership that ultimately forced Nokia to sell its mobile business to Microsoft, which of course meant the end of Linux in those devices.
But I didn’t really care. No calculator? No problem, I just fired up Vim while I was bored in class and wrote my own. Contacts book would crash? Again, a simple program I wrote let me quickly grep through a CSV file and add/update/call people.
It was such a joy to use I would carry it around even though I ended up using an iPhone as my daily driver.
The N900 was my dream device, and the prototype of the latest model still is on eBay for ridiculous price ranges.
I wish the pinephone would be exactly like the N900, but with better CPU specs.
I would, on the other hand, leave the CPU as it is, and welcome any change to battery life. That's the only factor preventing me from using one as a daily driver.
Looking at the comparison[1], it looks like the N9 was a bit more advanced, but it lacked the keyboard the N900 had. At least I also had a N97 :)
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=3398&idPhone2...
It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.
But who cares that stuff?
It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.
Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.
Only the Java/Kotlin userspace and the small set of NDK libraries are considered official and stable.
Anyone that ventures outside this path and isn't an OEM doing their own Android distribution, is on their own if the application actually works at all when deployed via the PlayStore, as the Termux guys eventually found out.
> It is currently in a usable state with support for various targets such as the N900, Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.
Neat!