I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a few pixels to show a clock.
But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead of a capacitive one (which Apple used).
Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward form factor) and the only device that could have been great, the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help either.
Then windows phone started happening and and they unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up in that particular round (despite never having worked in that department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware and software engineers in recent history.
Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company. Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that followed worked out.
What's more, even if somebody did understand this, any concerns would have fallen on deaf ears as Nokia also had a culture of corporate arrogance. It saw itself as too big & successful to fail. They could make whatever mistakes, but it was alright because they could always revisit and make better decisions later. I don't think they fully realized how wrong they were even years after the Android/iOS duopoly had already solidified - considering how immense amounts of money they kept spending (under M$) in trying to bootstrap the Windows Phone ecosystem that was always destined to fail.
I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such.
On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI elements were designed to be small. Only after they completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS Meego) it could have worked on the N8.
Meego/maemo had several UI redesigns. The issue was that Nokia just kept ripping it apart instead of just fixing it. The reason for the pen was resistive screens. Bigger buttons would have been an OK solution. The later n900 had the same issue. Ultimately, they bought QT to fix Symbian and then made the Meego team switch to that. They wasted years on the UI. Jolla emerged out of the ashes of that and is still around. Samsung's Bada is another descendant.
That was in 2007, around the time of the first iphone, but was so much more capable. Incredible at that time having all that power in your pocket. I never got lost in foreign cities because I could just get a GPS lock on the train station and find my way back, without using very expensive data in a foreign country. It was a strange thing being able to access the internet anywhere back then. In some ways it was a better time - social media networks hadn't cottoned on to the ability to deliver dopamine from the pockets of world's population, so the device felt powerful, but not like a ball and chain, or distraction-device like my pixel does these days.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/why-is-bill-gates-so-scar...
Twenty years ago my grandfather gave me his old Psion 3c. To a curious 10-year-old, the novelties of a world clock, spreadsheet and diary grew old after a few hours — but OPL caught my imagination…
Here I am now, two decades later, programming professionally full time as a startup founder — all thanks to a dinky little BASIC-like language on a pocket organizer from the early 90s :)
It's not obvious in Nokia's carefully crafted screenshots, but the N8 UI was very static, slow, and unfriendly to touch actions. It was fundamentally designed around menu navigation on phone keypads. That's not something you can simply fix by making the menu items touchable instead of using arrow keys, yet that's basically what Nokia tried to do.
Of course, both are simultaneously true.
As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an open computing platform.
I had no idea that it even had an FM transmitter and support for composite video as well as HDMI. Thank you for sharing that.
However since everything in Symbian was designed first and foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the framework actively recommended against use of threads. Instead they asked you to schedule things on the app's main thread which gave the framework more control over when to run your callbacks. This wasn't a terrible idea at all, but the implementation of this system as a C++ multiple inheritance contraption was pretty confusing as I recall.
I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to participate in some parts of society. Talking to people, banking, food delivery, parking, public transport...
As an active developer in a programming language with a small ecosystem, I scream this to the clouds all day: great software doesn't become well-supported until somebody has the gall to use it.
No thank you, I will never buy or use any hardware from Purism. They are openly hypocritical and I have zero trust for them.
Quoting from: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...
> The RYF has a “secondary processor” exclusion that can be granted on a case by case basis. We will leverage this exclusion to load and train the DDR PHY on the i.MX 8. We will use a secondary processor to keep binary blobs out of u-boot and the kernel.
Add extra silicon, to lock the user out of updating the firmware. Because the FSF will grant you an arbitrary badge of honour if the firmware is closed source, but not user-updatable. This is some next-level bullshit.
This is on top of the hardware being utter crap in terms of protecting user security or privacy; marcan_42 explains it quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30761886
If you want a reasonable trade-off between freedom and security, GrapheneOS is actually the only viable contender I'm aware of.
> If you want there to be a viable competitor to Chrome, use Firefox.
The IE monopoly was broken, because Mozilla made a better product. Also, it took Chrome to fully displace IE.
This is why FOSS can't "win". You have to have a better product, not just a feel-good badge. Look at the FOSS projects out there that are actually successful: they all have a good product strategy behind them. But for most FOSS activists, designing a better product is apparently much harder than indoctrination.
> This is why FOSS can't "win".
I'm not really sure what "win" means in this context. If "winning" is what Chrome is doing right now, I don't want Firefox to "win" either. Competition is good.
If your argument here is that FOSS can't produce a "better" product, Firefox is as much a counterpoint now as it was when it broke the IE hegemony. For the user, it's just as good as Chrome. It even provides some features Chrome doesn't have (for example, popping out videos and actually-good ad block). Nobody cares about how chrome is 50% (i.e. 0.8ms) faster at responding to thing X.
This is the problem. You advise on something, but you barely look beneath the surface.
> If "winning" is what Chrome is doing right now, I don't want Firefox to "win" either. Competition is good.
Please take a good look at what Mozilla has been busy with, this past decade or so.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-asses... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/12/mozilla-mourns-microsoft/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/06/09/mozilla-responds-to-firef... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
All this happened while Firefox struggled to modernise the rendering engine, introduce process isolation, address stability and performance issues... Yes I know Quantum eventually delivered on these - but it was too little, too late, and still isn't great.
The only reason Mozilla is still alive, is because Google is throwing money at them - to avoid too much attention from regulators looking at Chrome's market share.
> Nobody cares about how chrome is 50% (i.e. 0.8ms) faster at responding to thing X.
I care. Just put it on any older hardware. Like my 2012 Thinkpad (3rd gen i5; OpenBSD), or my partner's 2017 MBP (infamous for its poor thermal design), running Firefox on either is a miserable experience compared to Iridium (Chromium fork) or Safari. The hardware is still pretty good for our needs.
Don't get me wrong: I dislike Chrome just as much as you do. I want to like Firefox, and I do agree with Mozilla's stated goals and values. But I won't (and wouldn't advise anyone to) personally suffer over this, in fact doing so is doing Mozilla a disservice - they need to get the message, fix their act, and deliver a better product; rather than blowing cash on CEO bonuses, sealing deals to screw their users, or engaging in planet-incinerating ponzi schemes.
A hacker friend of mine carries around his pixel, which he has set up to use DAS KEYBOARD (ohne buchstaben) as his Linux development workstation.
This is a wonder to see, honestly. Truly a cyberpunk scenario out there on the edge of linuxphones.
Apropos, I flunk out with my PinephonePro+KB setup, which doesn't work nearly as well as his rig. Grr, power management "last 1%" ..
A friend of mine had one. He said he spent a few days in the countryside watching films he copied to an SD card on an old tube TV with it. He also told me how he could play MP3 files and listen it on the old FM radio that was available in the house he was in. It was also possible for him, once in a city a few kilometers away, to answer e-mails and read news using WiFi. You could just plug the mini HDMI to a modern TV, plug a keyboard on it and use a Bluetooth mouse to get a fully functional computer where you could even write and run python programs. All this at a time when basically nobody even talked about "convergence".
We've been walking backwards since then. These days the only devices able to give similar power are the still unpolished linuxphones. That's why we should support them or else we will continue walking backwards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8