alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well.
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.
Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D
Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live
My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien monologue scenes.
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 is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly.
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.