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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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