Nokia N900

» see nokia.com/n900 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the n900 was a linux desktop with a phone glued to the bottom of it. that was the appeal and the problem. in late 2009 i was finishing up engineering school in ankara on a regular nokia and a laptop, and the idea of a five-hundred-euro pocket computer that could run xterm was already a curiosity rather than a purchase. people on donanimhaber posted screenshots of nethack running on theirs. nobody i knew actually owned one.

nokia announced the n900 on 2 september 2009 at nokia world in stuttgart. it shipped 11 november 2009 with maemo 5 on a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen and a three-row hardware keyboard that slid out from under the screen. the cpu was a ti omap 3430 at 600 mhz with 256 mb of ram and another 768 mb of swap, because the device was meant to do desktop-class work on a battery. nokia called it an internet tablet that happened to make phone calls.

maemo 5 was a debian-derived linux that ran a real x11 server and real package management on an arm. you could ssh out of it and install nethack on it if you really wanted to. it never quite stopped feeling like a developer device, which was both the love letter and the ceiling.

~ the dossier ~

~ the lineage ~

the n900 was the fourth maemo device in a five-year run. the 770 internet tablet shipped in late 2005 with no phone radio. the n800 and n810 came next, adding a webcam and then a slide-out keyboard. the n900 added phone-call hardware and a 3g radio on top of the n810's keyboard, and the cpu got fast enough to render real web pages. it was also the first one anybody outside of nokia's debian-savvy enthusiast tier was going to buy.

~ what came after ~

in may 2010 nokia announced the n900 would be the last maemo 5 device. the platform would merge with intel's moblin under a new name. the new name was meego. the next phone was the [[nokia-n9]] two years later, and it died too. by the time the n9 reached stores in september 2011 the upstream meego project had been abandoned by intel. the n900 had a longer afterlife in community port form than nokia ever sold it for, with new firmware builds and modern browser ports continuing well into the 2010s.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »