Nokia N900 Necromancy

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

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.

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

It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.

It 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world

> 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.

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.

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

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 =)

Planet Computers Astro Slide 5G also sounds like it could work.

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.

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.

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

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.

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