Can a long-obsolete Linux phone from 2009 be of use in 2025? [Yaky] has a Nokia N900, and is giving it a go.
Back in the 2000s, Nokia owned the mobile phone space. They had a smartphone OS, even if they didn’t understand app distribution, they had the best cameras, screens, antennas, the lot. They threw it all away with inept management that made late-stage Commodore look competent. Apple and Android came along, and now a Nokia is a rarity. Out of this mess came one good thing, though: the N900 was a Linux-based smartphone that became the go-to hacker mobile for a few years.
First up with this N900 is the long-dead battery. He makes a fake battery with a set of supercapacitors and resistors to simulate the temperature sensor, and is then able to power it from an external PSU. This is refined to a better fake battery using the connector from the original. The device also receives a USB-C port, though due to space constraints, not the PD identifiers, making it (almost) modern.
Because it was a popular hacker device, it’s possible to upgrade the software on an N900. He’s given it U-Boot, and now it boots Linux from an SD card and functions as an online radio device.
That’s impressive hackability and longevity for a phone, if only we could have more like it.
Did something like this 10 years ago. It was not really daily drivable back then.
could you install ffmpeg then you can play iptv with terminal
It’s a pity the project from a while back to give the N900 a replacement motherboard (new 4G capable cellular modem, better CPU and a few other things) and a new software stack (that presumably would have included a modern web browser that could actually browse the large chunks of the web that the stock N900 browser can no longer visit) never really got off the ground.
Can’t speak to the n900 but i had the n810 and Maemo is a testament to the relative strengths of Android, as Linux skins go. Maemo used more open source components than Android did, but Nokia didn’t thoroughly debug or integrate these components and it comes off as a mess, the worst mistakes of each component compounded into a bad user experience and a bad developer experience.
I recently tried to re-use my n810 for something it should have been perfect for, playing mp3s over wifi. I immediately ran into a problem i vaguely remembered from back in the day…all sound i/o is through a version of esd (Enlightenment Sound Daemon) hacked to work with their proprietary dsp. A buggy hacked version of esd, which has about a 30% odds of crashing in any given hour. Needs a reboot, not merely restarting the daemon, to recover.
Unlike raspberry pi, no one had been telling me fairey tales about its openness so i was not surprised to meet a wall when i searched for source to their hacked esd. But i didn’t search very long, maybe it is more open than the i/o drivers on the raspberry. anyways, it’s garbage. Nokia lost the smartphone war for a reason.
My N900 works, but sadly has outlasted the phone network. Shame, I loved the little thing and am peeved the upgrade board never happened.
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