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Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.

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I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.

In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.

Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing.

I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.

And it pretty much fucked up the Qt project afterward.

I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.

>And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.

UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800

Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800

Why? I had N800 as my only mobile

Sure you're not thinking of the N900? The N800 didn't have any cellular connectivity, only wifi and bluetooth.

Yes, my bad, it was 900. After all these years numbers getting blurry in memory I guess

I really wanted the N900. I was saving money for it and resolved that the follow of the N900 would be my next buy. And then that never ever happened.

> In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)

I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?

To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2]. They then lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity starting in the second half of the 10's.

Are you talking about something else?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#History

I temporarily forgot that the iPod came out way before the iPhone. So yes, I guess they were called that then. But in my defense, I listened to MP3 files of radio shows that I downloaded manually, so I guess I wasn't quite using them as "podcasts" at that point.

I never had a N800, but I still have a working N900 used as my secondary phone and while it has a stylus holder, I have never pulled it out of there for many many years except to stim. Its resistive touch screen was excellent and I liked it more than today's capacitive screens. The only issue I have with it is that it's ageing and developing problems over years and eventually I may end up out of spare parts.

That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned. The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons as the N9 had in 2011.

But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).

Pretty sure there was some sort of App Store.

It didn’t have a hell of a lot in it, but I remember grabbing a cute little game (hex-a-hop) and … maybe an Angry Birds demo on it?

— edit - I’m thinking of the N900

The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)#History

Not denying how important it was, but the App Store wasn't "invented". It was created because Apple listened to what developers wanted.

I don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do in MacOS, they would be happy.

I can't tell for sure, but I would bet the app store concept was inspired from Cydia for jailbroken iPhones that used APT to download apps from a central software repository, which was already common in the Linux world at the time.

App Store as a central place to download apps was a really important concept for the iPhone ecosystem because it was a distribution and a marketing channel. Developers didn't asked for that and, for the better and the worst, we can give Apple some credit for building it that way.

I suppose the tricky thing is knowing when to listen to others and when you know more than everyone else.

As a Linux user, it just felt like a locked-down package repository to me.

I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.

Don't forget the N900 as well! :)

Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.

Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever. WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly stopped caring.

If anyone wants to know why Europe has issues with innovation needs to look no further than here

Nokia boomers squandered the opportunity they had with Maemo and kept insisting on the sinking ship (or burning platform) of Symbian

But to be really honest Maemo was also a dud. Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)

Steve Jobs was a boomer.

Boomer isn't age related anymore, it's a mindset

> Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)

X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting easy. What else would they have used at that time and what advantage would it give them?

I don't disagree with this, it had a lot of advantages. But at the same time I don't think it was good enough for the purpose

Because if it was good enough why didn't Android keep it?

Actually that's an interesting question; why didn't Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen to know how I would check what their reasons were?

probably because it's to complex. I think the earliest android demos were probably just writing to the framebuffer.

X11 support was also part of the early Mac OS X – even part of marketing pages, afair.

Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger, default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after 2011:

https://xonx.sourceforge.net/ “XFree86, a free implementation of the X Window System, has been ported to Darwin and Mac OS X. […] Our work has been included in Apple's X11 for Mac OS X. ”

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/x11-jaguar

https://www.xquartz.org/

The Nokia N9 used Wayland.

If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just fundamentally incapable of innovation!

Ok bro.

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