16 ms·

Nokia N900 Necromancy

480 points by yaky 9mo ago

0x696C6961 9mo ago
N9000 was so ahead of it's time.
- patrakov 9mo ago
  No, it belonged to an alternative universe - and, arguably, a better one.
shmerl 9mo ago
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.
xiaomai 9mo ago
I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.
- xp84 9mo ago
  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.
  - thesandlord 9mo 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...)
    - hexnuts 9mo ago
      You could always get something like a PinePhone.
  - vel0city 9mo 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.
jaffa2 9mo ago
Good article i enjoyed it.
internet2000 9mo ago
Buddy, just buy a replacement battery https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=BL-5J https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=BL-5J
- yaky 9mo ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 9mo ago
    > not sure what to make of "genuine" and "OEM" claims for a battery for a 16–year-old device They're lies, but the batteries work. There were Chinese lines manufacturing knockoff BL-5Js, and there may still be one or two, or just a bunch of crates filled with old ones. Source: still use an N900, but just for podcasts. > 10-year-old if you count compatible Lumias Worse, those Lumia BL-5Js aren't actually compatible. The slots cut into the battery aren't wide enough to fit into the N900. Unless you're willing to cut apart the battery itself, they're useless.
seba_dos1 9mo ago
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
- j16sdiz 9mo ago
  > 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
  - seba_dos1 9mo ago
    Should still be fine for at least a few years here.
    - gbil 9mo ago
      Depends on the country and provider but is sooner than later in Europe and I hate it that 2G is going away since all my old devices are not going to work again… https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/ https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/
      - bigiain 9mo ago
        Here in Australia 3G is totally gone already. 2G went years ago.
      - daveoc64 9mo ago
        That article is full of made up slop - at least in terms of Europe. Most of the dates stated are just plain wrong. The UK dates are completely wrong - by 5 years in most cases. All of the UK's 2G networks are still running, and the last won't be switched off until at least 2030.
space_ghost 9mo 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.
- distances 9mo ago
  It wasn't the same, but I had both and really loved the N9. My all-time favourite phone.
stego-tech 9mo ago
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.
- qingcharles 9mo 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.
  - rboyd 9mo ago
    is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone
    - qingcharles 9mo ago
      Yes! I was so excited he had that phone in the movie. They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in the production must have owned one of these phones. Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong" way -- they would put the external screen to their face, like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here: https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ
- seba_dos1 9mo ago
  N900 has nothing to do with Symbian.
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    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.
bpiroman 9mo ago
Seeing this makes me wanna get the Blackberry passport!!! And boot linux on it
- cookiengineer 9mo ago
  Check out the Hackberry designs from ZitaoTech. They're pretty amazing. I'm currently in the process of porting Plasma Mobile onto the device so that there's a better UI for it. [1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5 https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
ricardobeat 9mo 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.
jacquesm 9mo ago
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).
Nursie 9mo ago
> 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).
specialp 9mo ago
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
- internet2000 9mo 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.
  - asveikau 9mo ago
    I seem to recall they received criticism for going with gecko when the rest of the industry was getting behind WebKit.
- vvpan 9mo ago
  I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.
d3Xt3r 9mo ago
I recall there was a project to revive the N900 with modern internals, anyone know what happened to it?
- yaky 9mo ago
  There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up though: https://neo900.org/#main https://neo900.org/#main
  - Arch-TK 9mo ago
    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.
    - pessimizer 9mo ago
      This seems like weird revisionist history or I missed something. I never got a dime back that I spent on the Neo900, which I assumed they spent on their personal lifestyles and travel while trying and failing to design and manufacture a board. If there was actually a holdup of funds that killed the project, and eventually the funds were released, that's an even worse story. I didn't think there could be a worse story. It would mean that the project fell apart while they were waiting on cash, then when they got it they just treated it like a personal windfall. IIRC I ended up out $1.5K on the thing.
      - Arch-TK 9mo ago
        Paypal released the funds to the project, not to the people making the downpayments. Paypal never returns money immediately to anyone, they sit on it for months while they "investigate". I don't know who you are or where you were but the paypal problems were pretty well announced and _I_ was there. The project was already facing delays because a key person who was needed to make the board layouts was held up with the also now dead DragonBox Pyra handheld. I have no idea where you think the money went, how much you think there was, but it was a constant game of trying to drum up enough activity to gain attention of potential customers to bring in enough down-payments to pay the salaries of the small number of people working on the project while having enough money to buy parts. The money went into salaries, parts, nobody bought hookers or blow with it, and certainly nobody got anything but stress out of that project in the end. I believe Joerg Reisenweber paid a lawyer out of pocket to try to get PayPal to release the funds.
Retr0id 9mo ago
oof that soldering is not pretty, but hey, if it works!
smashah 9mo ago
N900 remains the best phone I've ever owned. Learnt so much with it.
devmor 9mo ago
Oh I miss this era of early smartphones. My life for a physical slide out keyboard on the iPhone.
andai 9mo ago
Can someone explain the use of super capacitors here? Do they function as a battery?
- picture 9mo ago
  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.
  - jsmailes 9mo ago
    Fascinating, thanks for explaining! I had assumed it was just that capacitors were easier to get hold of than batteries, and that the author was just putting up with a reduced "battery" life as a result. It makes sense to replace with capacitors if they're just using it for always-powered static applications -- probably with much lower fire risk to boot.
antran22 9mo ago
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.
- rcarmo 9mo ago
  The folk who left Psion tried to resurrect the Psion 3/5 form factor a few times as an Android phone with a fairly decent keyboard, but I don’t think they’re still around (or that it’s cheap enough to justify getting one).
  - jrmg 9mo ago
    Seem to still be around! https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all
- SahAssar 9mo ago
  I think the F(x)tec Pro1 might fit the bill, but getting it to run real linux might be a challenge. Planet Computers Astro Slide 5G also sounds like it could work.
sollewitt 9mo ago
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.
- xyzzy123 9mo ago
  Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
  - mikestorrent 9mo ago
    So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be. 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?
    - eru 9mo ago
      > I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
      - mikestorrent 9mo ago
        If nobody actually sees an AI saying a bad word, is it saying it?
- girvo 9mo ago
  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
leke 9mo ago
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.
sschueller 9mo ago
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.
9notorp 9mo ago
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.
- yaky 9mo ago
  Thanks! Maemo Leste is still around, I just tried it on a PinePhone with a keyboard not too long ago. It's not postmarketOS with a popular DE nor Android, but has a terminal, browser, media player, et.
isopede 9mo ago
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_.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  The only weird thing about it was that you couldn't charge a fully empty N810 with the micro(?) usb charger. It'd charge just enough to boot and then crash again, because it couldn't wake up far enough to negotiate a higher current with the charger. Had to use a barrel plug to charge it. Spent a very nervous and sweaty day figuring that out when I bought one used with no warranty or returns and it didn't boot properly =)
  - ACCount37 9mo ago
    It sure is a weird thing, but yes, the first mobile devices that shipped with USB didn't really know how to charge off it.
    - mghackerlady 9mo ago
      Which, to be fair to them, usb was never supposed to be a power delivery standard (at least not more than the 5 volts needed to power a mouse)
      - theshrike79 9mo ago
        And now pretty much all of the portable devices in my house can be charged with 5V/2A USB :D
jillesvangurp 9mo ago
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.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.
rcarmo 9mo ago
Pretty impressive. I have one of those (or related) around, might give this a go even if Maemo always ran like molasses.
- ezst 9mo ago
  Did it? I mean, even when you compare it to its contemporary devices (it took a while for Android to get close to smooth animations and fluid navigation, even without the type of true compositing and multitasking the n900 had).
jandudulski 9mo ago
Best phone ever made
lxglv 9mo ago
That's not a Necromancy, that's rather a Dr. Frankenstein's creature.
dtj1123 9mo ago
Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off? I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance. I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery? How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you even tell if an internal partition is corrupted? This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable, but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to mastery.
- Sammi 9mo ago
  I don't have a degree in low voltage electrical engineering, but haven worked close to people who are this does all look like grunt work in that field. So maybe get a bachelor in low voltage electrical engineering? It's all as much digital/computational as it is actually physical these days. Lots of educated electrical engineers end up as software devs, often doing the low level coding. Bootloaders, firmware, and drivers are stuff you have to figure out if you want to get modern electrical hardware to do anything.
  - Sammi 9mo ago
    * sorry, I accidentally a word
- kilpikaarna 9mo ago
  Can't claim to know the specifics, but there's some supporting links for both the battery and bootloader stuff in the article. The supercapacitor (can be a regular cap too, but would be physically much larger) is for buffering the power supply to prevent the device from shutting off if there's a momentary draw that causes the voltage to drop.
  - 9mo ago
niemandhier 9mo ago
There is so much love for the n900 and the n950. Yet still there is not true successor, although I would expect that producing things like this became cheaper in the recent years.
- ezst 9mo ago
  Same HN niche that wants smaller iPhones, just not commercially viable they say.
usagisushi 9mo ago
N810, N900, N9 owner here. Good read. I did the exact same modification to my N900; it was my internet router for several years. In those days, a mobile carrier in my country offered a relatively cheap data plan for dumb phones: unlimited data, but restricted internet connectivity with a WAP proxy. Fortunately, thanks to curl and busybox utils, I figured out that the proxy allowed CONNECT requests, and a tiny C program on my N900 was able to transparently tunnel all TCP connections to the internet. BTW, my N900 had another mod: it featured a Type-A female port :)
- augustl 9mo ago
  I was a huge N9 fanboy. Wish I didn't sell mine, and that Microsoft didn't kill it :)
BirAdam 9mo ago
I wanted an N900 so bad when it came out. A buddy of mine had one, but I had recently purchased a new iPhone. I couldn't justify switching at that point.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
classified 9mo ago
A portable Linux computer that can also act as a phone and has Cyrillic letters on the keyboard? Fucking awesome.
panick21_ 9mo ago
Man I really wanted the N900 so badly, my first real smartphone. But I decided to skip N900, because I was sure that the N901 (or whatever) was going to be insane good and I wanted to not spend the money yet. Sadly, that day never came ...
fenykep 9mo ago
On the software side there is an Argentinian (I believe) artist who actively uses blender on Nokia N95s, you can even connect a projector to it. Absolutely blew my mind when I saw it. https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-on-nokia-95/1535854/3 https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-...
TimByte 9mo ago
Probably not practical. Definitely not advisable. But deeply satisfying to read.
- yaky 9mo ago
  To quote someone from Hackaday: > We don't ask "why?", we ask "why not?"
ge96 9mo ago
Seeing htop running reminds me of Pine64 PPP ahhh fun to mess around with but eventually I sold em
geoffeg 9mo ago
My N900 was one of my favorite computing devices that I've owned. The keyboard was good enough for my needs, I could open a terminal quickly, battery life was fine. If someone came out with a modern version that had a slide out keyboard and similar size, maybe running a raspberry-pi level CPU, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
ZebusJesus 9mo ago
The best phone I have ever owned! Running linux you could do so much including hacking wifi. The keyboard was great and the pop out camera for video calls was fun to use.
silveira 9mo ago
Oh, I wish I could do something like that for my Nokia N800.
psyclobe 9mo ago
Oh I had that phone I recall trying very hard to browse to the Landon website while driving just to play some music heh. I recall having to spin with my finger in a spiral to zoom in.
alfiedotwtf 9mo ago
It’s a damn shame the Neo900 never happened :( Even after all these years, my n900 has been my favourite phone.

480 points by yaky 9mo ago

0x696C6961 9mo ago

N9000 was so ahead of it's time.

patrakov 9mo ago
No, it belonged to an alternative universe - and, arguably, a better one.

shmerl 9mo ago

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.

xiaomai 9mo ago

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

xp84 9mo ago
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.
- thesandlord 9mo 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...)
  - hexnuts 9mo ago
    You could always get something like a PinePhone.
- vel0city 9mo 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.

jaffa2 9mo ago

Good article i enjoyed it.

internet2000 9mo ago

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

yaky 9mo ago
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.
- pessimizer 9mo ago
  > not sure what to make of "genuine" and "OEM" claims for a battery for a 16–year-old device They're lies, but the batteries work. There were Chinese lines manufacturing knockoff BL-5Js, and there may still be one or two, or just a bunch of crates filled with old ones. Source: still use an N900, but just for podcasts. > 10-year-old if you count compatible Lumias Worse, those Lumia BL-5Js aren't actually compatible. The slots cut into the battery aren't wide enough to fit into the N900. Unless you're willing to cut apart the battery itself, they're useless.

seba_dos1 9mo ago

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

j16sdiz 9mo ago
> 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
- seba_dos1 9mo ago
  Should still be fine for at least a few years here.
  - gbil 9mo ago
    Depends on the country and provider but is sooner than later in Europe and I hate it that 2G is going away since all my old devices are not going to work again… https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/ https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/
    - bigiain 9mo ago
      Here in Australia 3G is totally gone already. 2G went years ago.
    - daveoc64 9mo ago
      That article is full of made up slop - at least in terms of Europe. Most of the dates stated are just plain wrong. The UK dates are completely wrong - by 5 years in most cases. All of the UK's 2G networks are still running, and the last won't be switched off until at least 2030.

space_ghost 9mo 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.

distances 9mo ago
It wasn't the same, but I had both and really loved the N9. My all-time favourite phone.

stego-tech 9mo ago

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.

qingcharles 9mo 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.
- rboyd 9mo ago
  is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone
  - qingcharles 9mo ago
    Yes! I was so excited he had that phone in the movie. They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in the production must have owned one of these phones. Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong" way -- they would put the external screen to their face, like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here: https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ
seba_dos1 9mo ago
N900 has nothing to do with Symbian.
- ahartmetz 9mo ago
  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.

bpiroman 9mo ago

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

cookiengineer 9mo ago
Check out the Hackberry designs from ZitaoTech. They're pretty amazing. I'm currently in the process of porting Plasma Mobile onto the device so that there's a better UI for it. [1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5 https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

ricardobeat 9mo 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.

jacquesm 9mo ago

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).

Nursie 9mo ago

> 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).

specialp 9mo ago

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

internet2000 9mo 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.
- asveikau 9mo ago
  I seem to recall they received criticism for going with gecko when the rest of the industry was getting behind WebKit.
vvpan 9mo ago
I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.

d3Xt3r 9mo ago

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

yaky 9mo ago
There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up though: https://neo900.org/#main https://neo900.org/#main
- Arch-TK 9mo ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 9mo ago
    This seems like weird revisionist history or I missed something. I never got a dime back that I spent on the Neo900, which I assumed they spent on their personal lifestyles and travel while trying and failing to design and manufacture a board. If there was actually a holdup of funds that killed the project, and eventually the funds were released, that's an even worse story. I didn't think there could be a worse story. It would mean that the project fell apart while they were waiting on cash, then when they got it they just treated it like a personal windfall. IIRC I ended up out $1.5K on the thing.
    - Arch-TK 9mo ago
      Paypal released the funds to the project, not to the people making the downpayments. Paypal never returns money immediately to anyone, they sit on it for months while they "investigate". I don't know who you are or where you were but the paypal problems were pretty well announced and _I_ was there. The project was already facing delays because a key person who was needed to make the board layouts was held up with the also now dead DragonBox Pyra handheld. I have no idea where you think the money went, how much you think there was, but it was a constant game of trying to drum up enough activity to gain attention of potential customers to bring in enough down-payments to pay the salaries of the small number of people working on the project while having enough money to buy parts. The money went into salaries, parts, nobody bought hookers or blow with it, and certainly nobody got anything but stress out of that project in the end. I believe Joerg Reisenweber paid a lawyer out of pocket to try to get PayPal to release the funds.

Retr0id 9mo ago

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

smashah 9mo ago

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

devmor 9mo ago

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

andai 9mo ago

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

picture 9mo ago
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.
- jsmailes 9mo ago
  Fascinating, thanks for explaining! I had assumed it was just that capacitors were easier to get hold of than batteries, and that the author was just putting up with a reduced "battery" life as a result. It makes sense to replace with capacitors if they're just using it for always-powered static applications -- probably with much lower fire risk to boot.

antran22 9mo ago

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.

rcarmo 9mo ago
The folk who left Psion tried to resurrect the Psion 3/5 form factor a few times as an Android phone with a fairly decent keyboard, but I don’t think they’re still around (or that it’s cheap enough to justify getting one).
- jrmg 9mo ago
  Seem to still be around! https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all
SahAssar 9mo ago
I think the F(x)tec Pro1 might fit the bill, but getting it to run real linux might be a challenge. Planet Computers Astro Slide 5G also sounds like it could work.

sollewitt 9mo ago

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.

xyzzy123 9mo ago
Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
- mikestorrent 9mo ago
  So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be. 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?
  - eru 9mo ago
    > I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
    - mikestorrent 9mo ago
      If nobody actually sees an AI saying a bad word, is it saying it?
girvo 9mo ago
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

leke 9mo ago

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.

sschueller 9mo ago

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.

9notorp 9mo ago

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.

yaky 9mo ago
Thanks! Maemo Leste is still around, I just tried it on a PinePhone with a keyboard not too long ago. It's not postmarketOS with a popular DE nor Android, but has a terminal, browser, media player, et.

isopede 9mo ago

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_.

theshrike79 9mo ago
The only weird thing about it was that you couldn't charge a fully empty N810 with the micro(?) usb charger. It'd charge just enough to boot and then crash again, because it couldn't wake up far enough to negotiate a higher current with the charger. Had to use a barrel plug to charge it. Spent a very nervous and sweaty day figuring that out when I bought one used with no warranty or returns and it didn't boot properly =)
- ACCount37 9mo ago
  It sure is a weird thing, but yes, the first mobile devices that shipped with USB didn't really know how to charge off it.
  - mghackerlady 9mo ago
    Which, to be fair to them, usb was never supposed to be a power delivery standard (at least not more than the 5 volts needed to power a mouse)
    - theshrike79 9mo ago
      And now pretty much all of the portable devices in my house can be charged with 5V/2A USB :D

jillesvangurp 9mo ago

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.

pjmlp 9mo ago

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

rcarmo 9mo ago

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

ezst 9mo ago
Did it? I mean, even when you compare it to its contemporary devices (it took a while for Android to get close to smooth animations and fluid navigation, even without the type of true compositing and multitasking the n900 had).

jandudulski 9mo ago

Best phone ever made

lxglv 9mo ago

That's not a Necromancy, that's rather a Dr. Frankenstein's creature.

dtj1123 9mo ago

Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off? I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance. I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery? How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you even tell if an internal partition is corrupted? This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable, but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to mastery.

Sammi 9mo ago
I don't have a degree in low voltage electrical engineering, but haven worked close to people who are this does all look like grunt work in that field. So maybe get a bachelor in low voltage electrical engineering? It's all as much digital/computational as it is actually physical these days. Lots of educated electrical engineers end up as software devs, often doing the low level coding. Bootloaders, firmware, and drivers are stuff you have to figure out if you want to get modern electrical hardware to do anything.
- Sammi 9mo ago
  * sorry, I accidentally a word
kilpikaarna 9mo ago
Can't claim to know the specifics, but there's some supporting links for both the battery and bootloader stuff in the article. The supercapacitor (can be a regular cap too, but would be physically much larger) is for buffering the power supply to prevent the device from shutting off if there's a momentary draw that causes the voltage to drop.
- 9mo ago

niemandhier 9mo ago

There is so much love for the n900 and the n950. Yet still there is not true successor, although I would expect that producing things like this became cheaper in the recent years.

ezst 9mo ago
Same HN niche that wants smaller iPhones, just not commercially viable they say.

usagisushi 9mo ago

N810, N900, N9 owner here. Good read. I did the exact same modification to my N900; it was my internet router for several years. In those days, a mobile carrier in my country offered a relatively cheap data plan for dumb phones: unlimited data, but restricted internet connectivity with a WAP proxy. Fortunately, thanks to curl and busybox utils, I figured out that the proxy allowed CONNECT requests, and a tiny C program on my N900 was able to transparently tunnel all TCP connections to the internet. BTW, my N900 had another mod: it featured a Type-A female port :)

augustl 9mo ago
I was a huge N9 fanboy. Wish I didn't sell mine, and that Microsoft didn't kill it :)

BirAdam 9mo ago

I wanted an N900 so bad when it came out. A buddy of mine had one, but I had recently purchased a new iPhone. I couldn't justify switching at that point.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

classified 9mo ago

A portable Linux computer that can also act as a phone and has Cyrillic letters on the keyboard? Fucking awesome.

panick21_ 9mo ago

Man I really wanted the N900 so badly, my first real smartphone. But I decided to skip N900, because I was sure that the N901 (or whatever) was going to be insane good and I wanted to not spend the money yet. Sadly, that day never came ...

fenykep 9mo ago

On the software side there is an Argentinian (I believe) artist who actively uses blender on Nokia N95s, you can even connect a projector to it. Absolutely blew my mind when I saw it. https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-on-nokia-95/1535854/3 https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-...

TimByte 9mo ago

Probably not practical. Definitely not advisable. But deeply satisfying to read.

yaky 9mo ago
To quote someone from Hackaday: > We don't ask "why?", we ask "why not?"

ge96 9mo ago

Seeing htop running reminds me of Pine64 PPP ahhh fun to mess around with but eventually I sold em

geoffeg 9mo ago

My N900 was one of my favorite computing devices that I've owned. The keyboard was good enough for my needs, I could open a terminal quickly, battery life was fine. If someone came out with a modern version that had a slide out keyboard and similar size, maybe running a raspberry-pi level CPU, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

ZebusJesus 9mo ago

The best phone I have ever owned! Running linux you could do so much including hacking wifi. The keyboard was great and the pop out camera for video calls was fun to use.

silveira 9mo ago

Oh, I wish I could do something like that for my Nokia N800.

psyclobe 9mo ago

Oh I had that phone I recall trying very hard to browse to the Landon website while driving just to play some music heh. I recall having to spin with my finger in a spiral to zoom in.

alfiedotwtf 9mo ago

It’s a damn shame the Neo900 never happened :( Even after all these years, my n900 has been my favourite phone.