Old, New, Borrowed, Blue. Maemo and Nokia, marriage made in heaven. #N9 #N900.
Old, New, Borrowed, Blue. Marriages made in heaven. Both devices at their launch signifying to the world that Nokia CAN do software AND hardware. Was looking everywhere for my N900 earlier. Found it later in the drawer that I had checked at least 5 times :S.
Since I’m still up. Presenting: An old device, borrowing something new and blue. 
All this time I was saying the N9 design kinda looked like an iPhone with a case (if you look flat on not seeing the tapered edges and just assume all rectangles with curved corners are an iPhone). All this time it was a Nokia N900 in a case :p
MicroB and Swipe. Gimme it pleease 
(Ha there was a three paragraph long rant about missing Maemo. I can’t stop myself from reminiscing about the epicness of the N900. Oh well, deleted that, I’ve saved you from it this time around :p)
Look at them, the legends of multitasking.
Best browser, most hackable, the most daring, best multitasking, great new Nokia interface. Maemo 5. If only we didn't stumble *cough*intel*cough*
Yes, yes, I know it’s 4am. I drank too much coffee to get through yesterday’s scheduled revision 
.
Update:
1) Old, New, Borrowed, Blue is a wedding reference. Hence Marriage.
2) Why I like N900/Maemo 5? For those who weren’t lucky enough to use one. Clicky for you.
About the Author (Author Profile)
Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and facebook.com/MyNokiaBlog. Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.comSubscribe
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i miss that guy as well
Nice
Wow the n900 looking hot
While i love my n900, which i am and have been using as my everyday phone for at least a year and half now, i’d say i’m looking forward to simpler and easier with a windows nokia now. There i said it. I put up a short fight with the idea of using windows over the n9, but that’s come and gone. Nokia’s market strategy of not allowing the US to have an NAM n9 worked on me, didn’t buy one and now i’m into the 900.
The n900 is like a muscle car, you want to own it, but you get tired of it being a daily driver. Sometimes you just need a quiet automatic ride to cruise around in and in this case the lumia 900 is looking like that phone right now.
um the N9 is universal XD
I like your analogy. I am feeling the same way as you do. It is not very easy to find a replacement for the N900 but I think Lumia 900 may do the job. I am still debating if N9 will be a better choice or not. I want an unlocked phone. Hoping that Lumia 900 will be available unlocked. I will be fine driving the muscle car for another year.
The Lumia 900 is AT&T exclusive so I’d imagine it’ll be locked down tighter than a gnats chuff.
N9′s are always unlocked SIM-free. At the moment they’re cheaper to buy than Lumia 800s too and I’d imagine cheaper still than the 900.
eg. Expansys UK are selling 64GB N9s for £425 now and £350 for 16GB. Remember that’s including the UK VAT of 20%. The Lumia 800 16GB is £430 for comparison.
And PR1.2 is just around the corner.
I’ve both a Lumia 800 and an N9. The Lumia stays in a drawer at home. The N9 is with me all the time.
Amazon USA has Lumia 800 for $515 and N9 for $519. I notice the prices change almost everyday.
I can’t decide right now. I will wait until my birthday in August. If nothing else from Nokia is better than N9 by that time I will go for N9.
whoa buddy i have a shelby gt500 and a n9 (formerly a n900) and i never get sick of driving or using either of them. especially on cold mornings starting it up and annoying the hell of my neighbors
Damn, i love that white shade on that curved glass!
How do you put your N900 menu like that? or is that an image?
I think that is the CSSU with harmattan icon pack
N950 would’ve been such a great successor, not that I’m hating on the N9 or anything…
Yep, the N950 would have been the true successor to the N900.
Unfortunately that got Elop’ed too…
Exactly… I would have got the N950 as well without any problem. Loved my N900 & E7..
Soooo get the N9…
The only significant advantage N950 has is QWERTY.
And it’s debatable as to whether it’s a notable one.
Plenty of N950 owners say they use the VKB/Swype more now.
As it’s hugely improved over the N900…
Just saw your name.
You do have a N9…
Yes. I have the black 16GB N9. Am trying to get the white one but haven’t found any one delivering it to my part of the world.
What I meant was I would have got the N950 along with the N9 to supplement by N900.. Love that form-factor having used the E7 for almost 8months at work.. Wish Nokia had released that..
You, and pretty much anyone I know… It was a stupid, stupid move not to release the N950 when it was already completed. Even if there were some minor hardware problems, those could be rectified easily during 2011 to launch together with the N9…
But that’s the Nokia of today – they don’t want to sell you their devices… Sad, really…
I would have bought the N950 as I love the form factor. I was also thinking about the E7 but I did not get tired of my N900 yet. When I changed to Anna icon pack, it feels like a new phone again.
Heck one dev (pycage) reckons the qwerty’s crap compared to N900.
(despite having the extra row etc)
Particularly getting it open initially.
He never uses it anymore, & wishes it wasn’t there.
As it merely adds bulk/weight…
The hinge to open the keyboard takes some getting used to. The hinge on the E7 I had was hard when new but in couple of days, it was of the right power and I got the positioning so right that it was effortless to open it.
I loved the E7′s keyboard more than the N900′s as it was softer to press and the feedback was just right. I used to have problems typing a long mail\response on the N900 with my fingers feeling the hardness of the keypad but with the E7, it was silky smooth. And from what I read, N950′s keyboard is similar to E7 than to N900. I guess its more down to user preferences..
Also, I’, not too concerned with the bulkiness of my phones. My phones in the last 3 years have been N900, N9, E6, E5, SE Satio among others.. The others I liked at work over the years have been the C7, E7, HTC TyTn II & SE Xperia Pro. Not a bunch of light weights, huh? I’m a mobile developer\tester and so have access to almost all the smartphones…
It is actually quite different to the E7.
Go speak to pycage…
He has L800, N9, N950, I think he even has or has used E7.
I also have a need for serious typing often.
I normally ssh-in for hardcore typing.
There’s also some truly excellent (better than built-ins) portable BT keyb’s.
I’m also finding I’m liking VKB/Swype much more than I though I would.
Esp. with all of mods etc. applied…
Thanks for the info. I’ll ask the dev..
I do like the VKB on the N9 but not a big fan. I like the feel from a real key press when typing.. Not the tactile feedback with the vibrator..
I usually have a good muscle memory so I guess I could force myself to type productively on a VKB, but to me much bigger of a deal breaker is the screen real estate it occupies.
Doing anything than the most basic tasks in shell on the N9 is a real PITA. And I need that quite a lot, which is why I keep my N900 (and have another one in mint condition in case this one dies). Incidentally, I’m also on the look out for the white N9 as I gave the black one to my gf…
“I’m also on the look out for the white”
If you find a good deal let me know please.
It’s like the white freaking unicorn, sheesh.
I’m in Australia…..
It is indeed the unicorn.. I’m trying to find deals which ships to anywhere in the world. Haven’t found any respectable one..
Old, New, Borrowed, Blue.
Nice Doctor Who reference Jay
Old new borrowed blue is a Wedding tradition (in the UK anyway) hence marriage made in heaven, nokia and maemo.
But I think I do remember watching that particular episode of Dr Who
http://www.weddingguideuk.com/articles/planning/traditions.asp
http://ask.yahoo.com/20031027.html
Thanks for the reply Jay.
TIL that the phrase is part of a very old wedding tradition. Sorry, as you might notice, I’m not from UK.
Still, when I wrote the comment, I felt as if I heard that somewhere else.
And yes, it definitely matches the Maemo/Nokia relationship.
Nokia stumbled because of internal processes far more than a result of the MeeGo tie-up.
Heck most (all?) of the UX work they did there, actually went into Maemo6x!
Before the strategy change…
They weren’t even close to heavily laying into the transition to full meego.
The tie-up as the single-biggest cause of delayed delivery is vastly overrated.
It’s extremely annoying that people keep propagating that myth.
For all of us unfamiliar with the N900 in practice, what exactly is so good about it compared to e.g. N8 with Belle, or N9, or if you prefer, WP 900? (please don’t post a rant, just looking for short and sweet explanation), and what is so good about MicroB exactly, vs. say Opera Mobile 11?
“what exactly is so good about it”
Compared to N9/Maemo6x, less & less…
*UX is way more open/hackable, but that’s kinda gradually changing w/N9.
Other layers of the OS are similar in term of openness.
*A big one people tend to whinge about most is lack of physical qwerty.
But the VKB+Swype combo is arguably among the very best out there.
I’ve seen N950 owners/devs proclaim they actually find the physical qwerty an annoyance.
As it merely adds girth/weight, & they mostly use the VKB anyway.
It depends on you & your usage, use it for a while & see if it’ll suffice.
*Resistive had some advantages, but they were more nerdy/esoteric.
N900 had higher PPI & sub-pixel density IIRC so legibility (in some respects) was better.
*IR transmitter, another more nerdy thing.
*FMTX & RX.
N9 has FMRX/RDS (proper implimenation not a hack) coming.
FMTX masy still be a possbility, not entirely ruled-out yet.
That is all I’m tired, happy researching….
Well let’s go back to when the Nokia N900 was launched.
Was was the comparable level of Symbian. The Nokia N97. I’d hope you would have seen what S60 5th edition looks like and on that hardware.
Next up the Nokia N900. For that time:
1) Super Fast
The N900 camera I found to be so much better than N97s. Full screen view finder and higher resolution video.
2) Incredible multitasking. Not just the amount it could do but the way it displayed it and also the amazing easy way it allowed you to switch between apps. App multitasking is more than doing many things at once, it’s also how easily you can go from task to task. And the little windows it was showing was all live, and the grid was contextual depending on how many apps you had running
3) The browser was out of this world. Period. What ever I could access on my desktop computer, this could. There was NOTHING at the time that could do that and even now I don’t think other mobile browsers can necessarily interact with things the level of microB (the ay it can bring up a cursor and allow you to interact with flash objects). Now instead of the mobile being capable for the browser, sites are being adapted for the mobile.
4) The desktop/homescreen was epic. I switched the way I interacted with my phones. Everything was on the homescreen and rarely used the menu. The widgets also were completely free and could be placed anywhere and could be of any size.
5) The UI was modern. It still looks better than Symbian Anna and some might even say Belle.
6) N900 had more pixels. In 2009 it went back to 800×480. iPhone had that low res crap and at the time resolution wasn’t as important.
7) It had competition matching hardware inside. It COULD do the things others do if devs did the work on it. Unlike Symbian which devs had no hope of getting similar apps because it just was not able to handle it. I think Samsung and SE’s Symbian phones had much more power under the hood than Nokia’s.
All of this work from 2009. Symbian in 2010, 2011 looked like what? Opera 11 on Symbian had no flash. Also I found Opera 11 buggy on my Symbian phones, prone to random crashes. Certain things I found not to load as well as on N900, some maybe due to differences in browser but also due to the fact that the screen on Symbian is nHD.
Just think if THAT was the platform Nokia had in 2009, what it could have been in 2010, what it would have been in 2011, and how epic it would have been in 2012.
Compare what Symbian has done from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012. Why has it taken so long to do anything? Where was the browser that Nokia said would be as good as the best? Back in 2010 they said that and in 2011 the browser was still shit. Opera 11 is not the default browser.
I dug up a first experience post I wrote about it:
http://mynokiablog.com/2009/12/03/one-week-with-the-n900-22-things-i-love-and-a-few-things-9-that-i-dont/
Video out of the box, divx, awesome
Higher resolution TV out
Menu was simple fluid, stable fast. For 2009.
Full screen calendar!
It had issues, I think I had another post some time after that detailing things I wanted to see. Overall though, it was definitely giving competition a run for their money and more so. It was unquestionably the top Nokia. It was also more importantly NOT PLAYING CATCHUP WITH THE COMPETITION. It had the biggest potential out of any Nokia phone. Possibly even now. Remember how week after month and even last year we still kept on hearing about the cool stuff people could do with the N900? Heard anything about the N97?
Apologies, you asked for something short. I cannot confine how awesome N900/Maemo is in so few words.
Yes, it’s my favourite mobile OS.
Yes, I prefer it to WP. Or at least what it could have been.
But still you prefer WP over Maemo6/Harmattan?
I really thought about getting the Lumia in addition to my N9. But still after hours of playing around with Windows Phone I find the N9 the better overall package for me. So it was a second N9 which the postman brought.
He supports it because that’s where he sees it LT future going.
In reality the OS is simply not “better” (yet?).
Perf/stability-wise in some respects “yes”.
In some (many) other areas “yes”, but overall? “hell no”.
And if you’re a total app whore*, it gets more brownie points there too.
*& if manual twks/hacks make you pee your panties.
MicroB is massively overrated too…
Fennec is very good & can actually do more than it ever could.
MicroB was however better optimised for the native UI & was snappier.
Latest builds of Fennec are much better in that regard though.
The main advantages of MicroB for me were Flash support and that with a resistive screen and pointer you could interact with websites on a more desktop level kind of way.
If you needed to get to a site that didn’t work well on mobile phones or needed the precision of a pointy stick over a fat finger then it was a winner. In some respects it’s still ahead of the N9 browser.
As a server admin, I have to access some pretty awful config pages running on embedded servers inside routers, UPS or even just plain normal webservers and back in 2009 they generally all were ‘optimised’ for a desktop experience.
Today, post iPhone, that’s less and less the case although conversely I’ve a couple of routers that can’t be accessed without an iPhone/Android app or via desktop software.
Last night I tried installing an SSL cert via both an iPad and N9 browser in cPanel/WHM on a web server. Neither could do it. The iPad got confused about which part of the screen I was trying to copy/paste. The N9 doesn’t (yet) do copy/paste in Mail or the browser so was a non starter. I could do it on an N900 easily.
I hope with copy/paste coming to the N9 in PR1.2 it’s back to being as useful a tool as the N900 but it’s not quite there yet. It’s why I still carry an N900 with me when I’m out and about and on-call for server management.
I suppose I should try the same with my Lumia but when I’ve tried IE on that with cPanel and some of the other server management tools I have, it’s not been a good experience. I just googled for an ssh client for WP and there is one, so maybe I’ll have another go. I just wish the browser was better on WP.
“The main advantages of MicroB for me were Flash support and that with a resistive screen and pointer you could interact with websites on a more desktop level kind of way.
If you needed to get to a site that didn’t work well on mobile phones or needed the precision of a pointy stick over a fat finger then it was a winner. In some respects it’s still ahead of the N9 browser.”
Agreed…
It’s more about how sites have been evolving in general than how bad current browsers are compared to MicroB etc.
Flash 11x actually (amazingly) is still a remote possibility.
Trying to get some feedback from the relevant Nokia dev (he’s annoyingly elusive).
My point was that most of the big sw advantages that Maemo5x had are being slowly but surely chipped away.
There’s some things that’ll never be replicated hw-wise, & even some sw-wise.
One thing you need to remember is that MicroB was released in 2009. Back then, none of the other mobile browsers (Fennec – Firefox if I’m not wrong wasn’t available) weren’t upto scratch for browsing websites designed for desktops. MicroB did it wonderfully and the rendering was pretty decent. Also, as Jay mentioned above, the resistive screen and the stylus helped a lot in having a browsing experience similar to one on a desktop..
Firefox was around then…
But didn’t start to become decent till mid-2010 onwards IIRC.
For it’s time MicroB was great…
And the accuracy of resistive further augmented that.
Now, & in today’s webosphere, not really.
“Now, & in today’s webosphere, not really.”
Agree. But they would have developed it during the last 2 years..
I tried using Fennec back in 2010 on my N900 and it was pretty slow and stopped using it.. Also, I’d feeling than Fennec on N900 was more like a test-bed for a later release on Android.. Using fennec felt like that..
“Also, I’d feeling than Fennec on N900 was more like a test-bed for a later release on Android.. Using fennec felt like that.”
That’s only relatively recent.
They’ve switch to native UX for practical reasons.
There’s some chats about it in the fennec thread at FMC.
And links to some google grp threads are there.
But Nokia’s devoted resource to maintaining an XUL equivalent.
As have others….
Oh & “for it’s time” i.e. not now.
The N900 was far more aggressive hw & sw-wise compared to N9.
Particularity hardware wise…
Agree to everything Jay mentioned below.. MicroB & Maemo5 were ahead of their times.. They did things other OSes (including Symbian) could only dream about back in 2009.. And it was the multitasking king..
Maemo would have been the OS king right now if Nokia had concentrated on it (even a tiny bit would do). Maemo6 was ready when the announcement of the merger with Moblin was done back in 2010 and when that wasn’t working, Nokia went back to Maemo6, added compaibility to MeeGo API and put swipe into it which then became MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Harmattan was a year late but still took everyone by surprise with its power.. Imagine Harmattan coming out in 2010 and its successor now, it could have a whole lot better..
It wasn’t ready then… not even close.
They still had a shit-load of Qt transitioning to complete.
The problem was they didn’t have enough resources devoted to everything that they needed to do.
Symbian was still the golden child…
Qt transition to Maemo was done way back in Feb\Mar 2010 with the then release of Qt (4.6.2) even though there was 4.7.0 for Maemo5, it had Qt 4.6.2 libs. They had stopped at that time and concentrated on merging Maemo & Moblin.. And if I remember, Qt 4.7.x for Harmattan only started at a later phase when they realized that MeeGo wasn’t going anywhere..
I agree that the resource allocation for it was n’t what it needed, but those devs have done incredibly well and I respect them..
I hope you’re not insinuating the merging had some kind of massive impact?
If you have a solid understanding of how it was all rolled out, you wouldn’t.
Well, I thought it was like this. Sorry, if it is wrong. Would love to hear more about it.
Start a thread in here & you may get detailed feedback
http://forum.meego.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2
If folks can be bothered digging into old wounds
Thanks.. I know how bad the devs must be feeling. Having been through that myself (not the Maemo\Moblin\MeeGo thing but a similar one at my work)..
They never stopped working on maemo6x to focus solely on raw meego.
That was never the plan…
The plan was always to roll-out at least 2x maemo6x based handsets before transition to pure meego.
Which would’ve completed roughly by the end of of 2011.
The work that went in meego’s handset ux, was mostly one & the same work than ended-up in maemo6x (meego-harmattan).
Thanks for the update.. I really appreciate it.
Are you sure that was never the plan? How can we confirm this that the original plan was 2x maemo 6 before pure meego (sorry if I’ve forgotten).
Were they ready? If not, why weren’t they ready? What caused such delays?
If they were ready, why didn’t they release it? (I’m very scared of hearing what I overheard at Nokia World 2010, that Nokia did not launch N9 because it was Symbian’s time to shine. This was at a party and a non-named nokia person was chatting to someone about it)
It would boil down very much to whether Maemo 6 was ready. Or at least some product for Nokia’s very high end to be ready and to have the development growth speed needed to be viable in the future.
Also, what happened to having something like MicroB on Maemo 6? That was one of the best things on the phone and they took it out?
The last official time-line was something like mid-2011 for 2nd Maemo6x device.
And there was to be one pure meego coming by Q4 2011.
Intel based.
The next year (2012) it would’ve been possible to ramp-up much more quickly.
Were the 2 Maemo6x devices N9 and the N950 or was there a 3rd device which never made it out? I guess the hardware\form-factor designing would have started back in 2010 if they were going to release by mid 2011.
Correct.
There was plans for a 3rd in there but it was conditional.
Don’t think it was set in stone IIRC.
Most people “assume/claim” Intel wouldn’t have had the silicon.
We’ll never know or sure, but I reckon they could’ve.
So the third wouldn’t have been needed.
Even if they didn’t hit Q4, they def. could’ve hit Q1.
Check out anadtech’s latest reviews of medfield.
While impressive (compared to the earlier Intel attempts), ARM is still the king… Intel will have to try harder.
But I agree, there was a real possibility to have Medfield-based device for Q4/’11 if they’ve carried out the plan…
@incognito
You kidding me?
It is impressive period.
I suggest you have a closer read of that anandtech article I linked to.
The rate they’re going the could surpass anything in the ARM world by years end.
Their biggest issue at this point, is getting a critical mass of people on board.
incognito,
I agree with Razus regarding medfield’s performance in that anandtech article in really impressive.. Especially the power consumption which IMO has always been a big problem for Intel over ARM.
Razus, I’m wondering if the 32nm process in fabrication has something to do with the power consumption? I’m not into this but think this has something to do with the performance as the ARM processers use the 45nm process.
N9′s design line actually started in the summer of 2009, by mid 2010 it already had most of its final shape, then the UI/UX guys chimed in and generally worked together to make it look as awesome as it is…
N9 was probably the only device Nokia ever released in Applesque style – do the software AND the hardware design in parallel.
Thanks for the replies, incognito & Razus.
I can’t stop wondering what would have happened if Nokia had released both the N9 & the N950 together..
In short the N900 is a full function computer that you can use as a mobile phone.
Kissed my trusty N900 goodbye recently while embracing my new and super-sexy blue N9. I never tinkered with my N900 the way the techies do over at maemo.org, but it was still a powerhouse, especially in the Web dept. But I’m glad I made the switch. My N9 does it all for me, and in a way that says, “Hi, I’m from the future!” I love it. Great site byw, I love the way you squeeze in time to update with tasty tidbits while running a crazy schedule! Appreciated!
“Great site byw, I love the way you squeeze in time to update with tasty tidbits while running a crazy schedule!”
Have to agree there…
Dunno how Jay & others do it!
So I have both the N900 and N9. The only problem I have is My N900 screen is broken(after 2 years of use) and I don’t know where to fix it.
Can anyone help?
New screens and digitisers for the N900 are pretty easy to come by on eBay. I’ve replaced the digitiser on my N900 twice.
Nokia N9 is the BEST!
JAY!!!! I NEED THAT THEME FOR MY N900 PLEASEEEEEEEE!!!
You can search for Theme customizer in the repository (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=62960) and then use the Anna\Harmattan icon pack from the repos (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=72719).
Not sure if there is any other way as I did it this way on my N900 and I also had installed Nokia Pure font and set that using the Theme customizer.
How did you get the 4 row grid for the n900? It looks cool.
When i saw the n900 in that cyan case, I thought to myself how cool it would be if the n9 could run maemo 5..
wow how can the n900 get meego harmattan