The Nokia N900: the future that wasn't | Hacker News Reader

The Nokia N900: the future that wasn't

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25 pointsfanf212 comments

I feel this author's pain.

I too jumped for a Jolla after Nokia's departure, with a 3D printed keyboard, thinking the experience of having this hackable Linux phone with on-device app development would be just as good as it was on the N900

Nothing has come close since. The perfect tactile feedback of the keyboard is hard to describe, the python apps you could mod and debug on a roadtrip, submitting patches on the fly to the upstream author.

The FM transmitter to play your music anywhere there wasn't an aux, the infrared to change your TV channel whilst relaxing on the couch, the kickstand and camera cover for the perfect convenience and privacy.

And the Maemo community was excellent, with many talented devs bringing their efforts to other ARM devices, and spawning orgs like Meego and Postmarket.

I can't put into words the budding hope and excitement there was at the time, but it just petered out once it became clear that camera specs and CPUs were all consumers cared about...

Its a real shame we let Americans destroy it.

I blame the consumers mostly. The N900 had the same graphics chip as the iPhone at the time, but that didn't stop my cousin from turning around to me and saying "uh, why did you buy that ugly phone?"

I actually met David Potter of Symbian fame once (he was the Chair of a research hospital in London), and asked him what happened to Symbian, who were the Nokia predecessor/successor/around at the time.

I can't quite remember his answer but it was something to do with different factions within Symbian unwilling to change for the future when it was clear that their best devs had already left for greener pastures.

So I think that time period, in general, had a lot of shifting moods both at the dev level and within consumer patterns, that led to the ultimate downfall of maemo

I don't think that's at all what consumers care about. Cell phones need to be approved by the carrier to even run on the network, and of those approved only a small subset is sold and subsidized by the carrier. Combine that with the small number of carriers allowed to operate in most regions, and you end up with a very limited number of products that the hobbled market can support, regardless of the volume. The real market is between the manufacturers and the carriers, not the manufacturers and end users.

There's all sorts of crazy tablets, laptops, and handheld computers at any given time, but even large conglomerates struggle to keep their phones available through cellular carriers.

Meanwhile, companies that are very successful with stagnant and feature-limited cellphone designs have to put much more effort into computers and tablets to get a reasonably market share. Apple kept lightning ports on their cellphones long after their tablets supported USB-C, despite effectively being the same hardware, sans cellular modem.

> Cell phones need to be approved by the carrier to even run on the network

That's a U.S. of A. thing.

I'm very surprised to hear this. What gain do carriers have in locking themselves down to specific vendors? I'm a paying customer and my device can connect to your network, why would you refuse me service?

Carriers use emergency services regulations to assert that unapproved devices should not be permitted to place or receive calls. The carriers claim they'd be liable if someone should dial 911 and the device doesn't function well enough for first responders to respond, and the only solution they proffer is device validation testing.

That's mental. Weak reply, I know, but... that's mental.

I never had an N900, but my wife and I ordered N9’s from overseas (we are in the US) and used them as our primary phones for years. I still have them in a drawer and used one last year for a few weeks just to see how it was.

OLED screen, excellent (for the time) camera, 64GB storage with a high end DAC, downloadable maps for navigation anywhere, and so many other features that were so ahead of its time.

I would love another phone like that.

I still have the predecessor, the N810. Keep meaning to dig it out and see what the latest Linux I could get to boot is. I'd love to have a pocketable physical querty messaging client. Debian has been booted on the N810 and Postmarket OS on the N900:

https://arachnoid.com/linux/nokia/ https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)

These keyboards were terrible to type on anyway. I was super happy with my sony Z4 tablet which came with a laptop dock that worked amazingly well. Super 'lappable' too.

And the psion series 5 further back, though it was a bit size constrained and too heavy to type on. I even got the Gemini pocket out of nostalgia but it was terrible in terms of software and the keyboard while looking the same as the psion, had a much worse mechanism.

There have been a number of futures that weren't.

I feel that the so-called market decides what goes in the future and sticks in the past.

No matter how good, cheap and effective something is. If it's embraced by markets (corn whatever reason, marketing campaign included), it will succeed.

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