▲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.
reply▲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.
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
reply▲xyzzy12340 minutes ago
[-] Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
reply▲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
> The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone.
It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world
daemonologist1 hour ago
[-] I apologize for being that guy, but they are being deprecated. To depreciate is to decrease in value.
reply▲jjtheblunt18 minutes ago
[-] but then, deprecation causes depreciation in this case, for extra fun.
reply▲Can I broadcast my own 3G cell inside my house with some magic radio device?
reply▲Not legally. Where I'm from they sold off the old 3G spectrum and frequencies, mostly (all?) to established telcos to use in 4G or 5G mobile services. They will not be happy if you start interfering with their customers there (especially not after the money they spent at the auction for those licenses).
There are some weird bits of the 900MHz band that cross into the fairly free-to-use ISM bands in some countries, and I recall a CCC talk where someone demonstrated a SDR setup doing mobile phone base station stuff by sneaking into what were ISM bands in Germany where he was that handsets would talk to because they were allocated as cellular phone spectrum in other parts of the world. Here in Australia we are limited and can't use the upper end of the 920MHz ISM band with LoRa devices, because Optus bought that spectrum for their phone network.
(Here in Aust4ralia we have other cellular spectrum and phone network problems, where a lot of older devices that support some 4 and/or 5G cannot reliably call 000 (our equivalent emergency number to the US 911), because the fall back to 3G when roaming onto other networks... A few people have died recently, and all the telcos are busy blocking a growing list of phones, mostly older Samsung ones if the noise in mainstream media here is accurate. I know my old but still otherwise functional Galaxy S6 Edge is not on the banned list.)
Should still be fine for at least a few years here.
reply▲reply▲Here in Australia 3G is totally gone already. 2G went years ago.
reply▲Where's the fun in that?
Maemo wiki states that Maemo Leste should be run from SD card. I am actually surprised that the phone can use the SD slot at high enough speed.
I agree that fun is enough of a reason, but treating the battery contacts with 5V seems like a rather sadistic kind of fun to me :P
reply▲> it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover
Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.
Yes it does (based on a hall sensor), though looking up it turns out that it's actually the Nokia's kernel that does it, so other OSes may not do it.
reply▲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.
reply▲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
reply▲internet20003 hours ago
[-] Web browsing wasn't a particular strength of it. I remember the N900's browser came with a version of Gecko around a year old by the time. Flash support was a downside. And of course, contemporary iPhones ran circles around it in smoothness.
reply▲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).
reply▲I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.
reply▲There are DOZENS OF US!
Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!)
I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to admit by 2008 that I wanted a smartphone instead of this second device with a stylus.
In those days though, browsing the web as though you were on a desktop was thought to be the goal to aspire to. Even the iPhone launched with the default behavior in Safari being showing whole desktop webpages, and you zoomed in to the parts you wanted to use. It took a year or two for people to figure out 'responsive' and within 4 years most sites were starting to be designed for small portrait screens. At that point the landscape N800 style was at a disadvantage since the mobile sites being designed to be a little leaner, were the wrong layout, but the desktop sites were pretty heavy for a mobile device to handle. And as "apps" ate the world that probably put the final nail on our little N-series.
thesandlord2 hours ago
[-] I remember running around campus looking for WiFi hotspots with my N810, using Google Voice to text my friends ($0.10 per text, no thank you!). Learned so much Linux admin skills that became so useful later in life. Favorite device ever! Eventually moved to Android smartphones but the ease of hacking, the amazing community (internettablettalk.com, looks like its gone now :( unfortunately...)
reply▲You could always get something like a PinePhone.
reply▲vel0city51 minutes ago
[-] Back in the day I just had a cheap dumb phone with the $15/mo unlimited 3G data add-on and popped that SIM into whatever other device I was feeling at the time. It seemed like if it wasn't a common phone in the US, Cingular/AT&T never noticed.
reply▲ricardobeat4 hours ago
[-] 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.
reply▲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.
reply▲qingcharles4 hours ago
[-] My first Internet phone was the Nokia 9000, which was limited to GSM (9600bps). I built and debugged one of the first major music streaming services on that connection because I was working remote and my DSL got cut off. I had to add a 2Kbps stream option to the production servers for myself just so I could test it.
reply▲is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone
reply▲N900 has nothing to do with Symbian.
reply▲Fortunately - Symbian was painful. It was designed with a half-baked C++ standard and devices with 1-2 MB of RAM in mind and apparently never thoroughly upgraded.
reply▲I recall there was a project to revive the N900 with modern internals, anyone know what happened to it?
reply▲reply▲It wasn't really abandoned so much as killed by PayPal.
The project used PayPal to gather downpayments, PayPal decided to lock the funds for months (almost a year or maybe longer IIRC) because they saw money coming in but no confirmation of goods coming out. And, you know, when it comes to big companies, no explanation is sufficient, you are guilty of something because some heuristic said so, so the funds were locked, legal threats didn't work (try threatening a company with the power of a small/medium country), and by the time they got their money back, key people who were going to work at a discount to cover key milestones had moved on.
Can someone explain the use of super capacitors here? Do they function as a battery?
reply▲It's because the phone design needs the battery to help stabilize the voltage under load. As we know, digital devices can nearly instantaneously change the amount of current they consume and thus require layers of energy storage to accommodate the transient currents quickly. However, the changing current consumption doesn't just happen briefly. It sometimes continues to ramp for more than milliseconds (a glacial time frame for modern electronics). Thus generally every component in the power supply network of a design serves some stabilization and filtering role, including the batteries.
It appears that in this case, as the original battery aged, its internal apparent resistance (ESR) increased beyond the original design expectations, to a point where the phone won't work when plugged in to a charging cable because despite the charging cable most likely being able to deliver sufficient power at DC, it had too much impedance to supply it quickly enough. When current is demanded from a source that has too high impedance to supply it, the voltage drops. This will result in significant voltage ripple to the power supply of the digital circuits, which can cause logic to not function correctly.
Adding a large capacitor basically replaced the filtering and stabilization role of the original battery.
Interestingly people often intentionally remove capacitors for side channel measurements and glitching attacks.
internet20005 hours ago
[-] reply▲I looked, but TBH, not sure what to make of "genuine" and "OEM" claims for a battery for a 16–year-old device (or 10-year-old if you count compatible Lumias). Descriptions usually do not mention manufacture dates either.
reply▲space_ghost4 hours ago
[-] 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.
reply▲N9000 was so ahead of it's time.
reply▲patrakov26 minutes ago
[-] No, it belonged to an alternative universe - and, arguably, a better one.
reply▲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.
reply▲> 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
reply▲N900 remains the best phone I've ever owned. Learnt so much with it.
reply▲Oh I miss this era of early smartphones. My life for a physical slide out keyboard on the iPhone.
reply▲Good article i enjoyed it.
reply▲oof that soldering is not pretty, but hey, if it works!
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