Oh I remember having a netbook during Maemo times, as a Linux user was really hoping it would succeed and bring a true Linux experience to mobile world
On of the big tech letdowns in my life. I was excited about the N900, but to young to really drop that amount of cash on a new fancy phone and I didn't want to buy the first product of the platform.
But then it just sort of died. There was one more release but by then it was clear where it was going. It wasn't even released widely.
It wasn’t the end, the N9 was the more refined and frankly quite brilliant follow up. Unfortunately they failed to launch it in any major markets because they’d pivoted to Windows.
Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up quick though.
I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.
Yes. That just shows how promising it was. But if you only bring out an initial modal and then basically never follow it up, you are simply not competing against competitors who bring out new hard-ware and soft-ware every year and also do hardware-software co-design.
Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform it was a gigantic bust.
...which didn't matter at all because the community has been doing a pretty good job with CSSU and it was only several years later when it started to truly show its age.
Eh, I had one and in the end I just didn't find it that great. It was slow, the resistive touch screen was finicky, and there wasn't good apps or software for it. I remember being in a bar once with a friend and we were racing to get directions on our phone to the next bar we were going to (maps and directions on the phone was a magical thing back then), and his iPhone had the results on google maps before I had managed to finish waking up the phone and loading... Here (?) Maps, or whatever it was called.
In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow).
I had a friend who used his N900 as a server at home, with an USB network card and all :D
The N950 was a lot better and even the N9 had its moments. But like the GP said, both were killed by internal politics and the move to Windows Mobile. Which eventually tanked their whole mobile phone business unit.
I bought an N800 when the iPhone was new. Figured the extravagant data plan wasn’t important and that the wide (it felt like 18:9!) screen MUST be a better idea for using the web.
Ironically the mobile web was basically built after that, and built specifically for portrait screens!
