Nokia N900 Necromancy

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.

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.

Pretty impressive. I have one of those (or related) around, might give this a go even if Maemo always ran like molasses.

I have such fond memories of the Nokia N810.

I did my master’s thesis on that device. I had a custom hypervisor running a guest kernel, virtualized networking, and a buildroot userspace. I could SSH into the host N810, then SSH into the guest. I even virtualized the framebuffer at some point and got the “dancing baby” animation playing from the guest. It only ran at a couple frames per second, but it was _amazing_.

I used to work as a software tester in Tampere, Finland with Nokia devices. We didn't test those devices in particular, but they were a big buzz in our office back in the day. I still have my n810, but haven't used it in years after the battery died. I remember adding a bunch of unofficial repos and having things like apache and python running on it and using it as a web server for a while. Eventually the battery was so discharged, even having it plugged in to the PSU would not be enough to keep it powered. It was such a shame it wouldn't run without the battery. I probably would still have use for it.

Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere?

Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover.

The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some damage in my pocket and got a small crack in its bottom middle. Touch still works perfectly though, so I'm not in a hurry :D

Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.

I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio Angry Birds

I'm just wondering if there is any real modern pocket cyberdeck with the form factor of those old phones, with a slide out physical keyboard.

I find the BL-5J battery format and its siblings quite cool actually. They fit much better for some projects than a 18650 etc. I wish there where more standard sized batteries and PCB holder for batteries like the BL-5J. While I can get many 18650 battery holders for PCBs even surface mount I have not seen anything more compact.

I still have an N800-tough, it still works. It even holds a five day charge. This is from after the reboot, it runs linux and so far it has been ultra reliable. I have an older one as well that still works but this one is just a little more useful (it can serve as a wifi access point).

I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.

I had one of these around 2011! Used it to host a websocket server - a novelty at the time - during a conference talk, and it held up to 30+ clients before dying.

Man, I miss my N80ie. The towns I lived in didn’t get UMTS/3G until the ‘10s, but the EDGE radios were enough. Loved Symbian, miss it.

I recall there was a project to revive the N900 with modern internals, anyone know what happened to it?

N900 remains the best phone I've ever owned. Learnt so much with it.

that was an enjoyable read! loved reading stuff about smartphones on forums, especially symbian ones where the die hard fanboys absoultely believed that this device was better than the iphones and htcs had to offer (including me). too bad maemo / meego died off, we may have seen more interesting devices. loved the "Contains no LLM-generated content" bit.

Can someone explain the use of super capacitors here? Do they function as a battery?

Buddy, just buy a replacement battery https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=BL-5J

I loved my N900. Enough that I eventually replaced it with an N9. It wasn't the same, tho. The N900 had a certain charm.

Nokia was so cool, before Android only SoCs swamped everything and it became impossible to run normal upstream Linux stack on phones because no one provides open drivers for a whole bunch of stuff.

N9000 was so ahead of it's time.

> A quick glance at the forums also confirms that USB port was poorly designed and is prone to breaking.

That was the death of mine. I had an external battery charger that I could use to charge the machine overnight, but it was too much of a hassle so it got recycled and I moved on to a Galaxy Note, which everyone laughed at for being enormous but now look at us, the base iPhone 17 is around the same size...

The N900 was a great little device, it was like having a tiny computer with full keyboard in my pocket. It's just a shame the built-in FM transmitter didn't work reliably, because I used it to listen to music in the car a lot.

It was also amazing to be able to download the whole world's map data (such as it was in 2010) to the device, so the GPS navigation still worked off-grid (deep-outback Australia in 2010 was not always that good for data connections).

Seeing this makes me wanna get the Blackberry passport!!! And boot linux on it

Oh I miss this era of early smartphones. My life for a physical slide out keyboard on the iPhone.

I still have one in a drawer from when I worked at Nokia around 2009. Great device. I also had the N800 before that.

What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the full keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was Linux phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-get install whatever the hell you wanted. Including compilers, developer tools, openssh, and whatever you could think of.

The big difference between the N800 and the N900 was that the N800 was more of a tablet form factor (released years before the ipad or the iphone were a thing). The N900 was smaller and had a proper phone built in. It could connect to mobile networks and make phone calls. The N800 was by operator decree basically crippled to be wifi only. Operators absolutely hated the notion of an open platform like Linux running on devices connected to their networks.

The victory Steve Jobs imposed on operators was basically getting them to beg on their knees if he would please allow iphones on their networks. He completely turned the tables on them. The first iphones were exclusive to some networks only and people cancelled their subscriptions if they were on the wrong network. That's why iMessage is a thing and SMS texts are a thing that is no longer generating meaningful amounts of revenue for operators. There was no off switch for iMessage. Steve Jobs basically told operators to take it or leave it. Likewise MMS was not a thing on the first iphone. Nokia mistook that as a fatal omission. A missing feature. The truth was that MMS was dead as a doornail the moment 3G internet connectivity became a thing. Why have operators act as a middle man? Steve Jobs had no patience for any of that.

Anyway, Nokia still obeyed the operators and it ended up crippling anything with software potential. There were big discussions about having Skype on these things. The N800 had that. And a webcam. You could make video calls with it. In 2007. The N900 did not have Skype. And it was positioned as a developer phone. Worse, it had to compete internally with Symbian and the Symbian team was in control of the company.

So, it was positioned as a developer phone and the N9 was launched (2011) similarly crippled in the same week that they shut down the entire team working on the OS. That was around the time Symbian lost out to Windows Phone and the beginning of the implosion of Nokia's phone division.

The key point here is that Nokia had an Android competitor long before Google launched the Nexus. Before they had the Nexus, they were dual booting N800s into Android. I flashed mine with a development build at some point even. Nokia screwed up the huge chance they had there long before the iphone was about to launch. The N770 launched late 2005. The iphone wasn't even announced until 2007.

Nokia did not understand what it had and crippled the platform instead. And then it dropped out of the market completely.

Good article i enjoyed it.

oof that soldering is not pretty, but hey, if it works!