I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.
Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?
For me that is not even in the same league than the N900.
There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.
All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego from Nokia.
> There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.
Probably F(x)tec and their successors. Those have a similar small keyboard as Nokia N900 and Nokia N810
There's also the Hackberry. This device uses a real Blackberry keyboard, with custom firmware. It works together with a 3D printed case, and a RPi CM5. This keyboard, while small, is very ergonomic.
You need to operate this as a business first, with the freedom part being a nice bonus. Nobody cares how free your thing is if it's dead on arrival and gets beaten by an entry-level smartphone.
Make a competitive product. Nowadays that could very well just mean Android with manufacturer-sanctioned root access and preinstalled terminal & X/wayland server for those who want to run desktop apps.
The Jolla phone someone linked below actually looks like a decent product. The Android app support means it's actually usable in the modern world, and the specs look competitive.
Not only that, but you should not get suckered down into overcomplicating things by chasing complex novelties, e. g. integrated slider- or clamshell-implemented keyboards, silly and outdated form factors (clamshell UMPCs, OQO already showed the way), etc.
You want a good, small keyboard? Design it to be attachable. This is possible in a variety of ways and can be adapted to your manufacturing expertise. It also leaves open third-party hardware support for your device. Not to mention maintainability/repairability. It's utterly puzzling to me how many hardware start-ups already fuck up the basics.
And never forget: In a satured market, even catering to a niche, means you should go for a somewhat unique feature set. How many ultramobile devices are out there that are truly accessible and usable? That goes beyond just safety or repairability.
OLED screen? I'd rather prefer something PWM-free. Precision control? Digitizer/stylus support. You don't even need to house the stylus in the device. But it would be very useful to have at least one. Audio? Yeah, 3.5 mm is a must. Dedicated, easy-access mSD (Express) card slot? Yes, please. Exchangeable batteries? Good idea, as long as it's a standard design in good supply. Kill switches. Maybe a modular camera set up like those Chinese flagships that are otherwise rather useless. Full-feature connectivity (1-2 x USB 4). Etc.
Get one of the BB + USB-C keyboards available.
But then again, experience shows I'm wrong.
Or do you remember the Beepberry/Beeper?
OTOH, your phone is more than capable, so maybe a small bluetooth keyboard is all you really need. There are apps like iSH on iOS or Termux on Android that give you a Linux shell.
As for the N9, it still has the most modern and beautiful GUI of any smart device, 15 years after being discontinued. It will take at least 15 more years for iOS or Android to reach that level, if ever. The physical design was also very nice and refined.
For those who don't believe me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFNXhiFnKY
As for the N900, I just wanted one or two more hardware iterations (the design flaws were annoying, and a couple mentioned in the OP.) The N9 looked great, but I couldn't get over the loss of the keyboard (although of course that was our dictated future.) The Meego transition seemed unnecessary and annoying (not the UI changes, but everything else), especially the move to rpms from debs. They were just hostile to Debian mainline for some reason; if they had been less hostile, their work would have survived without a break even after Elop intentionally tanked the company. That proprietary moat is just irresistible.
iOS and Android literally grabbed the designers of Maemo/Meego and WebOS to update their horrible UIs. Back then, they were still even refusing to multitask. Android copied WebOS almost exactly.
Going by the username having a near slur in it. Probably that.
It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.
It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion.
It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard).
It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances.
It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a phone.
It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch a movie on it without issues.
I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the market today, as at the time it was much better than early Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty in comparison.
I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like device. What a world it was...
But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps.
The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.
What killed these Linux phones was Microsoft doing a hostile takeover of Nokia. The owners of Nokia felt they couldn't compete with Apple's iPhone and decided to scuttle their business and transfer out as much money as possible to their own offshore accounts in the Pacific before the company going belly up. I think they could have competed if they weren't such cowards.
My BSD statement stays, though, MS did some very good work with the WinPhones, and in fact they were super snappy and useful, very close to what iPhones were at the time. And let's not forget, that the flat looks of (not sure which macos) was directly influenced by these winphones...
I don't think I ever saw N9 or any of the N9XX phones in real life.
BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix.
What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too.
Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on.
Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
> The underlying OS makes no difference. perhaps you've never experienced the bliss after setting up a BSD that just works 10 years after... and have never experienced the incredibly stable and snappy multiprocessing this miracle of a kernel (and OS) exhibits for decades now.
Let me tell you something - 20 years ago Linux was slow and unstasble as shit, and even slower on embedded. On the other hand FreeBSD and other BSD-derivates were super stable, but took more effort to setup and work with. They did not have the UI though, what Apple did was to wire their half-baked NeXT-inherited GUI on top of it and it flied.
I'm not even going to comment on the abomination called ObjectiveC, but matter of fact - the underlying OS workings were done in a brilliant way, WHICH, more than everything else enabled all the glitter tossed over the UI that you guys love so much. Like, there's a reason for game engines being written in C++ and not Python, right? Still a programming language though...
Sure lot of people adore what Sir Jony Ive did to the overall look and packaging of these products, and for a reason. But what truly distinguishes all these Mac products is what they can get out the hardware.
Sorry, but win3.11 did not work well on a 128kb RAM device. I've followed everything MS released since DOS 3.30 and witnessed firsthand the evolution of Linux and many of the distros. Nothing comes close to what Apple could do and is still doing with their hardware/software. No matter if you like Tim Cook (me personally - not) or Steve Jobs (very inspiring guy).
One of the reasons MacOS could draw attention from developers, who now form very important part of the user-base, is the fact they have a Unix-like thing at their disposal, and a very fast unix-like thing with some sort of a not-so-disgusting UI (wait for MacOS 26 though).
Nobody cares about darn window shadows, edges, or the unreasonable animation effects that we'd be turning off sooner or later.
The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.
Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.
Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.
tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.
Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.
The fact you could run apt on it did not help that much for the regular user.
... while you were on the movies? That's "Mr Robot" level, kudos!
That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody would use.
You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their Linux phone.
Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering to Linux phone enthusiasts.
Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they did.
That was never the problem. The problem was how could Nokia stay competitive to Apple and Google when their focus was selling Linux devices aimed power users.
Not good enough to save it from the iPhone onslaught.
People on HN make this mistake to assume that they represent the "average user", the same mistake Steve Wozniak made. No, the average user wasn't interested in all the features of the N9. They much preferred the simpler iPhone and the proof is in the pudding.
>and it seems it sold very well in the few markets where it was actually sold
How do you know it sold well when Nokia never release official sales numbers for the N9?
Estimates put the N9 at less than 1 million sales in the 23 markets it was sold in. A drop in the ocean compared to total iPhone sales of the same timeframe in same 23 regions which estimate at 50 million total. Face it, the N9 was a sales flop no matter how you try to spin this, and launching in more markets would not have moved the needle significantly to make a dent in the iPhone.
>(sadly no major markets)
It launched in 23 markets mate, mostly EMEA and Asia. Not NA because even Nokia leadership realized the N9 won't stand a chance to compete with the iPhone and Blackberry on their home turf.
>A decision which many people called out for being stupid before the consequences had fully unfolded.
Nokia was already dead man walking even before that. Even their own employees said so when they got to play with the first iPhone in their HQ. The N9 was the band playing on the decks on the Titanic.
Blaming Nokia's inevitable failure on Windows Phone is historical revisionism. They would have failed either way since they lacked the software ecosystem beyond the phone that Apple and Google offered their users.
Fanboys praising the N9 as something that would have magically saved Nokia even they have done X or Y or Z with various Linux spins, are huffing some top end copium.
In contrast the explanation I have for Nokia's failure gives a logical explanation: They panicked, prematurely declared thir existing phones obsolete, cancelled there next-gen development such as N9, and instead offered a poorer product (Windows Phone) at a later time. It is difficult to see how this can lead to anything else than failure.
Whether N9 and co. would be successful enough to save them in the long-run is pure speculation, but I see no fundamental why it could not, and it was ready at a time where Nokia was still big enough to get some app developers on board.
I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.
I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.