Nokia N900 Necromancy

https://yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia-n900-necromancy/

by yaky • 7 months ago

480 189 7 months ago

shmerl• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

xp84• 7 months 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• 7 months 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...)

vel0city• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Good article i enjoyed it.

internet20002• 7 months ago

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

yaky8• 7 months 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.

pessimizer3• 7 months 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_dos15• 7 months 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• 7 months 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_dos15• 7 months ago

Should still be fine for at least a few years here.

LeoPanthera• 7 months ago

Can I broadcast my own 3G cell inside my house with some magic radio device?

daemonologist• 7 months ago

I apologize for being that guy, but they are being deprecated. To depreciate is to decrease in value.

secult• 7 months ago

In Europe we keep 2G as a failsafe, deprecating only 3G.

yaky8• 7 months ago

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.

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

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

Retr0id2• 7 months ago

it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover

Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

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.

tetris11• 7 months ago

Yep, I remember there being a magnet hack placed on the kickstand so that it would be detected properly

cl3misch• 7 months ago

I think OP wants it to be an always-on device. The last sentence in the post is

Nokia N900 enjoying its new life as an online radio device using Open Media Player.

But I agree with your sentiment. Using supercaps seems overengineered to me if the device is connected anyway.

yaky8• 7 months ago

It can't be used in a mobile way much anymore, with all 3G and many 2G shut down in the US.

The caps / supercaps are necessary to provide enough current during boot or more resource-intensive tasks.

space_ghost• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

stego-tech• 7 months 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.

qingcharles2• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

N900 has nothing to do with Symbian.

ahartmetz• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

cookiengineer• 7 months 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

ricardobeat• 7 months 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• 7 months 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).

0x696C6961• 7 months ago

N9000 was so ahead of it's time.

patrakov• 7 months ago

No, it belonged to an alternative universe - and, arguably, a better one.

Nursie2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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

internet20002• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

I seem to recall they received criticism for going with gecko when the rest of the industry was getting behind WebKit.

vvpan• 7 months ago

I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.

d3Xt3r• 7 months ago

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

yaky8• 7 months ago

There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up though: https://neo900.org/#main

Arch-TK2• 7 months 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.

Retr0id2• 7 months ago

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

smashah• 7 months ago

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

devmor• 7 months ago

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

andai• 7 months ago

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

picture• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

rcarmo2• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Seem to still be around!

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/all

SahAssar3• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.

mikestorrent2• 7 months 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?

girvo2• 7 months 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

Sharlin• 7 months ago

It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.

gspr5• 7 months ago

Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water. It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband – I'd rather just connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the complications of having a whole extra computer in there.

Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?

testfrequency• 7 months ago

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.

theshrike793• 7 months ago

The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

Tor3• 7 months ago

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.

fragmede2• 7 months ago

Have you seen the GPD pocket 4? There's a 4G option, but unfortunately not one for 5G (yet?)

https://www.gpd-minipc.com/products/gpd-micropc2

larodi4• 7 months ago

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.

ErroneousBosh• 7 months ago

The underlying OS makes no difference.

BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix.

What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too.

Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on.

Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?

chriswarbo2• 7 months ago

A bigger mistake was to not give the N770, N800, etc. phone capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn't even consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS. They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.

Nursie2• 7 months ago

Good god no.

The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.

Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.

Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.

tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.

Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.

carlosjobim4• 7 months ago

Linux was not a mistake on these devices. And I say that as the foremost hater of open source and Linux you can find around here. In fact, the N9 Linux phone was a huge success among everyday people in several countries. Farmers, teenagers, everybody got an N9. You couldn't go to any small party without at least two people having the N9 phone. Everybody loved them. It was in no way a hacker device for nerds.

What killed these Linux phones was Microsoft doing a hostile takeover of Nokia. The owners of Nokia felt they couldn't compete with Apple's iPhone and decided to scuttle their business and transfer out as much money as possible to their own offshore accounts in the Pacific before the company going belly up. I think they could have competed if they weren't such cowards.

ZenoArrow• 7 months ago

I wish the N950 was fully released, there were some produced but I don't think it was commercially available. It was the true successor to the N900, it would have used the N9 software but unlike the N9 it also had a physical keyboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

cvak• 7 months ago

yeah I scooped n950 on some online marketplace for very cheap since it was bricked, fixed it and resold it for profit, but what a beauty of a phone, I wish I kept it.

aa-jv• 7 months ago

I was always kind of dissuaded by the chunky, bar of soap nature of the Nokia devices. (But then again, I had a few OpenPandora to play with as well..)

I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like device. What a world it was...

BatteryMountain• 7 months ago

Same here. I miss my N900 dearly. It was one of my most expensive items at the time, and I enjoyed this device more than the Galaxy S I9000.

It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion.

It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard).

It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances.

It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a phone.

It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch a movie on it without issues.

I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the market today, as at the time it was much better than early Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty in comparison.

jack_tripper3• 7 months ago

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.

That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody would use.

You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their Linux phone.

Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering to Linux phone enthusiasts.

Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they did.

fragmede2• 7 months ago

Back then, absolutely. But the long tail of the Internet, which is far more pervasive these days compared to back then, means that such a device could exist. Which arguably it does, with the GPD win max 2, if you install Linux on it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467566.The_Long_Tail

atmosx• 7 months ago

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.

... while you were on the movies? That's "Mr Robot" level, kudos!

burnte• 7 months ago

To me it was also a huge disappointment. I had the N810 and it was amazing, I still have it. I wish I could get a new board for it. But the N900 was all cheap plastic, no metal like the 810, the magnets fell out all the time, the software was janky, and several promised features never arrived. It could have been awesome, but Nokia had already been distracted in their 5 device plan that the N900 was part of. We never got the follow up and Maemo was abandoned.

TimByte3• 7 months ago

It wasn't just a phone, it was a little pocket computer that assumed you were allowed to solve your own problems

nico• 7 months ago

Amazing! One time I did something similar. Went to see a movie that was dubbed in Spanish, so I downloaded the movie in English and extracted the audio ahead of time, then I played it on my phone wearing headphones while watching the movie (had to pause/play to adjust timing a few times in the beginning, but after that it was great)

leke• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

yaky8• 7 months 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• 7 months 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_.

theshrike793• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

jillesvangurp• 7 months 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.

fsflover• 7 months ago

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.

Such phones exist today, too. Sent from my Librem 5.

chriswarbo2• 7 months ago

Indeed, I had a Freerunner back then (the N900 came out after, and I couldn't get its predecessors since they weren't phones, as the parent points out). It served me well for about a decade, and I've now upgraded to a Pinephone.

miladyincontrol• 7 months ago

There was no off switch for iMessage

There sorta was and still is, just it uses the same endpoint as APN/APS so if any telecom wanted to block it all iphone users on their network would lose push notifications too.

I'm glad telecoms got put in their place, used to be a give them an inch and they'd take a mile type situation. I dont miss their games.

ezst3• 7 months ago

Nokia did not understand what it had

Like any other large company, Nokia needed time to adjust its strategy, whether it would have happened or not we will never know, because Nokia got Trojan horsed by Microsoft killing any plausible competition to windows phone, and the whole phone division as a result. I still find it incredible that it happened just like that.

pjmlp• 7 months ago

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

rcarmo2• 7 months ago

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

ezst3• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Best phone ever made

lxglv• 7 months ago

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

dtj11232• 7 months 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.

Sammi2• 7 months 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.

Sammi2• 7 months ago

* sorry, I accidentally a word

kilpikaarna2• 7 months 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.

dtj11232• 7 months ago

I appreciate what you're saying here, but what I'm asking about isn't the set of solutions to the problems described in the article. What I'm interested in is the underlying mental model of how this kind of device works.

lambdas• 7 months ago

You can pick it up passively over time, and with your skills, if you were to actively engage then I suspect pick up the necessary very quickly, and the rest comes from experience.

I picked up Linux at 13, fortuitously just in time for the release of the Nokia 770 (later getting, and still owning the N900 too).

At that time, getting real dirty with the kernel, hardware, cross compiling etc was necessary, so 1) there were more resources 2) it was seen as mundane, busy work rather than mystical and difficult.

If I were to say how to learn the same things today, I’d probably say Gentoo is ideal - it’s insanely flexible in tinkering, has good resources on compiling the kernel and packages, and I’m a fan of crossdev for cross compiling.

Getting real dirty with hardware and electronics, the obvious answer would be one of the Raspberry Pi lineup, but if you’re very tenacious, patient and a touch unhinged, then I would actually say now’s the time to get in on RISC-V.

It’s still early days, so there’s lots of resources that have very thin abstractions between hardware <-> tooling <-> code. Devices are cheap and exciting. You’ll be on the same footing as most other people so you won’t feel like a dunce.

The cons are that a lot of RISC-V devices get shipped out with very little documentation (and sometimes only in Chinese), binary blobs making mainstream kernels difficult, and you’re learning at the same time, so you might feel you’re ice skating uphill.

Wrt to the bootloader and partition corruption; towards the twilight years of the life of the N900, when it became clear N900 had been abandoned and the N950 was still only available to select few, a bunch of smart people on the Maemo forums started reversing and writing open drivers (uboot bootloader, wifi, camera iirc), so they became pretty documented.

saidinesh5• 7 months ago

Honestly, It is just a matter of starting somewhere. Anywhere. All these hobbies are a huge rabbit hole that seem to converge.

I have friends who started with porting Sailfish OS to their old Android phone and now they are designing their own PCBs for their home automation system. They custom built their own RC cars, 3D printed their own ergonomic keyboards, designed their holiday decorative lights etc..

I have seen a lot of people in my local FPV Drone Racing community, who started with building their own custom drone and then moved on to 3D printing their modifications, tweaking their firmware, building their custom lithium battery packs, designing their ergonomic keyboards, and now fiddling with their home automation software/hardware.

Also installing Arch Linux onto some random piece of hardware, regularly following Hackaday like blogs seems to help.. lol.

Nextgrid3• 7 months ago

I don't think true mastery exists in a continuously-evolving field like tech, it's all people just figuring things out, and accumulating enough knowledge/experience means the things you build no longer blow up and mostly do what you want them to ("mostly" being load-bearing here - even the big boys publish errata notices for their chips because even they miss things sometimes).

yaky8• 7 months ago

I read about lithium-ion and LiFePO batteries on Adafruit a few years ago, and saw similar projects elsewhere. The bootloader stuff is on Maemo wiki, along with tools to flash the device (which is also a bit of dark magic arts to me).

TBH, I didn't / don't exactly have a path. I started with Raspberry Pi (and Linux for the second time) 10+ years ago, which led me to Arduino, which led me to low-voltage electronics in general. At the same time, I had an unreasonable dislike of google, which led me to flashing LineageOS on a test phone, which then became my main phone, which eventually led to PinePhone, which didn't work out, but was fun.

TimByte3• 7 months ago

A lot of this looks like black magic from the outside because the learning path is mostly invisible

lelanthran• 7 months ago

Like everything else,work on the observability first.

Can you grab the current boot partition? Once you have it can you decode it? Do you have a reference boot partition? Can you extract the bootloader from the boot partition? Can you read those binary files? Maybe turn them into readable assembly?

Can you clip a multimeter onto a PC trace? Can you do the same with a scope? Can you decipher what the 'scope capture means? Maybe use a bus pirate instead?

It's all about observability.

niemandhier• 7 months 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.

ezst3• 7 months ago

Same HN niche that wants smaller iPhones, just not commercially viable they say.

usagisushi• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

BirAdam• 7 months 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.

classified• 7 months ago

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

panick21_• 7 months 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• 7 months 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-...

TimByte3• 7 months ago

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

yaky8• 7 months ago

To quote someone from Hackaday:

We don't ask "why?", we ask "why not?"

ge96• 7 months ago

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

geoffeg• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

psyclobe• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

It’s a damn shame the Neo900 never happened :(

Even after all these years, my n900 has been my favourite phone.

Nokia N900 Necromancy

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