The power of things like this taking off is not what they are now, but what they can be. There are lots of real people with their own good reasons to not be tied to Google/Apple, and whats really impressive here is that unlike firefox OS, they are (in my opinion) doing this in a much better way.
As this catches on, it only helps improve linux hardware (ARM) support, telephony applications for linux, and the like. As well as being able to have (or make for others) a truly remarkable user interface and apps. This is a mobile computer, running linux, running a desktop environment (not webkit, or Java VM, or closed source code) that only limits what you can make by your skill and imagination.
Yes it looks pretty mediocre now, but that's because its waiting on you to get involved.
I used to have that. It was my Nokia n900. I was able to pull up live thumbnail previews of all apps running in the background, and this included live simultaneous previews of: youtube videos in a web browser, games, and Debian, without lag. Try doing that on today's technology. It had a wonderfully acurate resistive touch screen that was pressure senstive that was really good for drawing and coloring! The camera would start up immediately as soon as I opened the shutter, even while the screen is off and in a sleep state. My modern android device takes so much longer to even get the shutter ready.
I loved always having access to a physical keyboard and an actual root linux shell out of the box without any hacking. I loved that my n900 behaved more like a computer and less like "mobile" device.
Too bad Nokia decided to end support for the n900. Most of its developers and lots of its users abandoned ship, and now I only use it as a camera because the n900 is stuck in 2009, and the web in 2016 is so bloated and heavy that nothing- not even the web browser or the unupdated apps- are usable now.
You are not alone, I have two good friends that still have theirs too, and nothing will ever be good enough for them again. That phone spoiled them, and is the direction they wish phones went. Alas, they have gone the way of the masses instead, but you know if someone like a OnePlus came out with a modern powered phone, with a big battery (phone size doesn't matter to us), a physical keyboard, dual sim, expandable memory and an open source OS, there would be DOZENS of us that would snap it up. Dozens!
Huh, i completely missed that Nokia made a Symbian variant of their split keyboard design. I recall a relative of mine owned one of the featurephone models.
Things like this is what makes me feel that the mobile market came to a screeching halt somewhere around 2007, and has barely been picking up speed since.
I loved Nokia's smartphones so much. E70, E61, N900... Those were the pinnacles of smartphoning for me. Their successors somehow manage to fall short in vital aspects every single time, it's beyond frustrating.
Have you looked into sailfish? No physical keyboard, AFAICT, but it's based on the successor to Maemo.
Also, look into the neo900 project and Pyra. Neo900 is trying to upgrade the n900, and Pyra is the successor to Pandora, which is a pocket computer in a semi-similar vein to the old nokias. Neither is finished, but they're worth a look.
Sailfish is cool, I used to use it on my Nexus 4. Its app support has never been quite as good as Maemo's, IMO.
The neo900 makes me sad, because it's basically my ideal phone, but the price is just too much for me. I know it's not their fault, the low production quantities will do that, but still. It's an updated n900, with a fully FOSS stack and an isolated baseband to boot... awesome.
I would have bought a Jolla ~4 years ago if their UI components (Silica) were open source. They said then that they plan on Open Sourcing them but they still haven't.
Plasma Mobile and Tizen are my only hopes for getting a non-Android Open Source OS on my phone.
Sailfish is based on Meego, which was a merge of Maemo and another project. It was the OS that backed the N9, the last phone Nokia made before they went to MS.
Keep in mind, if you live in the US, that the Jolla is an EU phone, and doesn't support US 3G or 4G frequencies. I was stuck with a Jolla on 2G for a while. Recently I got a OnePlus X and installed Sailfish OS on that, and the experience has been much better.
Jolla was formed by devs that left Nokia after they abandoned Meego. I had an N9 and currently have the Jolla phone with Sailfish. They're very similar.
My raspberry pi 3, encased in a rainbow colored 3d printed case and with a 3.5" touch screen, is what took the place of my n900. It's a fraction of the cost of an n900, but with a standard rpi linux distribution and modern specs. Sure I can't make calls with my pi, but the sacrifice is well worth it for the nerd appeal of having a fully functional computer in your pcoket.
Raspberry Pi has one big flaw as a mobile device: it cannot sleep. If you disable peripherals etc you can get it down to ~100 mA or so when idling, which is still order of magnitude more than a real sleep mode.
I like xubuntu because it's minimalistic and not as bloated. It doesn't take a lot of effort to set up your favorite packages like a lamp server and the like after a basic install. My cheap touch screen is a little laggy, but when plugged into an HDMI monitor, the OS is as fast as a desktop computer. Be sure to buy the latest rpi though, because the original rpi1 is kind of slow and disappointing compared to the latest one with much nicer specs. With an external high-capacity battery and a USB wireless keyboard, it can even function as a laptop replacement if you're okay with using linux as your main OS.
There are certain devices like this, right? A similar thing happens with the HP-15C calculator, it was so sought after in eBay, etc., that HP even made a special edition a few years ago.
Same here. Obviously you're 100% right in how little of a target demographic we are, but I'll never forget the sheer joy of finally saving up the money for the n900 and getting it.
As mentioned, it'd be a usable device on its own to this day. If newspaper sites hadn't become unusable without an adblocker, if I didn't need browser updates every nanosecond and if the latest memory-hogging web trend language wasn't, well, what it was. I'd still use it.
Now I own two mobile devices. A BlackBerry Passport. Great UI, physical keyboard, indestructible. Dead software ecosystem, horribly closed source, last of its kind and while there's a lot to love It's not hard to see why. Then there's a rooted HTC phone. Great choice of software (termux alone makes up for so much). Hate hate hate ssh'ing with a touchscreen. Typing generally. Terrible battery life. Seems like it'll die from one harsh drop.
If my social life would not force mobile messengers on me, I'd have gone back to 20€ dumbphones and text/voice only. Though I bet even those come with a horrible browser and the accompanying remotely exploitable holes now.
All in all? Wonderful project. I'm very much hoping for a third player in the mobile game.
The Neo900 would have been excellent had it come out two years ago, as originally planned. However, the various delays keep pushing it back, although it still has the same hardware. It will end up quite underpowered like the N900 is now, combined with an older chipset that doesn't support things newer open phone OS's require (like Wayland).
Boy do I miss the N900... Mine is sitting on my desk like a museum piece gathering dust, and it makes me sad that no modern phone has come remotely close to it.
I used it as my main phone when travelling for years and it worked everywhere I needed it to when other phones wouldn't. I'd use it for getting unwacoughted access to WiFi when I was in a tough spot. I'd manage my servers with it. I'd use it to emit music through the radio on car trips and such (why is this no longer a thing?). I could even push my own programs on it without having to make a sacrifice to the phone gods. I'd also kill for a keyboard like that again.
But no, instead you have to get a hobbyist device or get one of the many shiny slabs running (poorly) one of three (and I mean, really, two) ecosystems.
Google made a huge mistake choosing to base Android on Java, IMHO. I know they did it because they felt it would be easier to get developers on board but it's the main reason Android is slow and memory hungry. OSes like Plasma prove that compiling binaries for ARM processors is not a big problem and that compiled code runs much faster. Java byte code may have the potential to run close to native speed but in practice it carries with it a lot of bloat.
You obviously aren't aware that since Android 5 there isn't any bytecode being interpreted.
Android is 100% native code since that version.
Even the changes in Android 7, although they use an intepreter written in Assembly, the code is JITed with profile information, both are cached and it gets ultimately fully compiled to native code when the device is charging.
Also in case you didn't notice, Apple is pushing for LLVM bitcode for their newer OS versions.
There is even a BOF on this weeek's LLVM meeting about how to make LLVM IR fully hardware neutral.
Unfortunately, despite all this Android is still a turd of an OS.
Just about every Android device I've used has been painful in some way or other and invariably I've ended up rooting it and installing a custom firmware, generally the most light-weight one I can find.
Unfortunately, despite these antics Android remains annoyingly prone to sluggishness, freezing, reboots and various other random problems.
Ultimately it seems that with Android you're either forced to use a stock ROM which imposes a heavy memory footprint due to all the "wonderful" tweaks Samsung/Sony/HTC/Xiaomi have made or drop down to a user-built AOSP-based variant that is inevitably plague by its own issues.
I'm horrified to think this kind of thing is the height of the mobile user experience.
That's weird; Android works pretty well for me these days. I have lots of problems with sluggishness, freezing, rebooting, etc. on my old HTC phone which had Gingerbread (I think), an ancient version of Android.
But on my Galaxy S4 and my current Galaxy S5 (which is updated to 6.0.1 I think), things work quite well.
It's not perfect of course: I'm using the regular Samsung/Sprint ROM which is absolutely loaded with crapware. I disabled all the crapware, but it's still there wasting a lot of valuable space out of my 16GB. It could be a little faster at times, like with the camera. But freezing and reboots just aren't a problem the way there were on old Android versions that I've used.
I do plan on trying out CyanogenMod sometime when I have some free time. But for now, the carrier-pushed version seems to work decently well. I don't have any giant complaints.
Those problems don't lie necessarily with the language, rather on the quality of work of everyone involved.
I have seen pretty sluggish, full of memory leaks and dangling pointers, C code written at enterprise level, by developers that couldn't care 1s about code quality.
I spent $300+ (way too much!) for my n900 and I still think it was worth it. It was my replacement for my tmobile g1 phone.
The n900 is everything that I thought the g1 was going to be, but wasn't. In a way, it was my fault for blindly creating my own hype over a first generation product I knew nothing about. The g1 turned out to be my bad and disappointing foray into smart phones.
Also, yes I have heard of the neo900 project, but am sad that the project is so far from its goals. There will never be enough n900 users to meet a crowdfund. :(
I wouldn't be so sure. There are a lot of N900 users and fans.
Another interesting project which might fill my desire for a true mobile computer (if only I could afford it) is the Pyra, the more powerful successor to the Pandora. But at $~500-$~600, it may not be worth it, and it still hasn't actually released yet (although the company did make the Pandora, so they have a history of Getting Stuff Done).
If you're going on the cheap, you can always hack together a Raspberry Pi and a tiny screen, keyboard, and battery into something semi-workable, and use a phone for the rest.
I think the Pyra even has an (optional?) modem module you could potentially make calls with (using a Bluetooth headset rather than sidetalking-style ;-)):
> If you're going on the cheap, you can always hack together a Raspberry Pi and a tiny screen, keyboard, and battery into something semi-workable, and use a phone for the rest.
You can get a GSM board from Adafruit fairly cheaply, which would give you 3G data and voice/SMS on a Pi. You'd have to do your own wiring, but if you're building something like this that wouldn't be a problem. Throw a Ting SIM in there (or your other favorite carrier) and you're good to go.
Basically a mobile phone version of Bunnie's Novena laptop, though not quite as open source (at least not until Broadcom finishes opening up the RPi's processor).
I clung to my N900 for so long. I got it at launch in fall 2009, and I used it as my daily driver until early 2014, when I finally buckled and got a Nexus 5. By that point, my N900 was barely usable, but I was really dragging my feet on a replacement because I knew that any other OS would be a step backwards.
That's exactly what I got mine, and exactly when I retired mine because I didn't want it to flat out stop working. The USB port died and the SD card never worked to begin with. Once the circuitry for the wifi becomes inoperational (like what happened with my tmobile g1), then I consider the phone officially dead...
Yep, my USB port died too. I ended up getting an external charger and a handful of spare batteries. Did that for about a year or two before I got my Nexus 5. At least buying new batteries gave me back my battery life that had degraded to almost nothing over the years.
On top of that, over the years, the kickstand broke, the screen got scratched badly, my belt clip broke in multiple places, the SIM slot became really finicky, and even the plastic around the keyboard was starting to come out.
And a lot of the problem was performance: a 600 MHz OMAP3 was great in 2009, but by 2014 it was just too slow to handle modern websites, and the browser based on Firefox 3.5 (maybe 3.6?) couldn't even handle some newer websites. And to be honest, the RAM was low even for its time... only 256 MB, operated as a unionfs with the rootfs, plus some of the (very, very slow) eMMC was formatted as swap. Over time, most apps stopped working: I remember using Facebrick to access Facebook for a while, and it was nice, but eventually the author stopped updating it, and Facebook changed their API, so no more Facebrick. It got to the point where I'd only use the browser, terminal, camera, and dialer, because that's all that was useful.
About a year after getting my Nexus 5, I booted up my N900 to get some photos off it, and I found I had difficulty emailing them to myself because Gmail had changed their API and flagged my N900's connection attempts because they used the old API that was deprecated for security reasons. None of the emails went through, and when I got back to my desktop, Google took me to a page telling me it thought my account had been compromised.
I've already disposed of two or three spare batteries. I have two chargers and 3 batteries that I rotate in a cycle. It's always cheap to order them off amazon or ebay.
Universal battery chargers are a life saver if you have multiple types of batteries to charge.
I think the n900 was a great device but you have a case of rose tinted nostalgia. Today's android phones can do everything you described and more and better. For example, my phone can go from deep sleep to perfectly focused photo snapped in half a second.
I'll give you the keyboard though. Nothing beats a full keyboard.
The best mobile computer I have ever used, I kicked myself when I dropped it on the floor and the screen broke. I ordered a compatible screen from ebay and changed it myself. It was so much fun opening up a terminal and ssh'ing into my workstation. Then Nokia had to go out of the way to ruin it for me.
you're giving me nostalgia. I always dreamed that my n900 was going to be my futuristic bitcoin phone. I suspect that people started abandoning the n900 right around the time that our dreams were crushed in the great bitcoin crash of not so long ago.
The trouble isn't the software. I'd gladly jump onto Ubuntu Touch and wanted to try out FireFox OS when it was still maintained, but the trouble is the hardware. I didn't want to buy a Nexus, which seems like the only device that's the first to be supported by any alt-OS.
Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could just run Linux on your x86. Sometimes half your hardware didn't work, but as long as you could get Ethernet and display you were in pretty good shape usually. The thing is, you could install it. You could try it.
With ARM, everything is so specialized. Looking at the forum posts for this thing, half of the threads are about porting to devices.
The manufactures have no incentive to standardize the platform. They customize to a device and it's better for them if you just throw it out in two years when they drop support.
A limited number of hobby devices now use the device tree configuration, but the ARM platform is far from being as standard as Intel or Power.
If the Ubuntu Edge had been funded, I think we'd be in a difference space with at least a handful of devices that had some standardization (if only to accommodate Canonical). As it stands, ARM fragmentation is a huge problem for hackers/devs.
Regarding drivers, they are probably present as linux kernel modules in original phone firmware. Cannot they be reused in a custom open firmware? Of course you might need a userspace components to control hardware too which is a problem.
Also SOC manufacturer usually has the drivers reference code but he might not publish it.
>Regarding drivers, they are probably present as linux kernel modules in original phone firmware. Cannot they be reused in a custom open firmware?
Generally not. Linux kernel modules generally can't be loaded by kernels with different versions, as the ABI constantly changes. It can be hard to use them even with the same version, if it was compiled differently. This is why they're always pushing for the drivers to be open-sourced and submitted to the kernel project for inclusion, because maintaining them separately is a giant PITA.
Phone makers don't bother because they don't care: they're not going to maintain the drivers very long anyway.
I never liked KDE looks nor ergonomics. Nor their attempts at grand projects (plasma makes me cringe everytime I see the word now). But I appreciate "simpler" open linux platform for smartphones. Wish them the best.
ps: I was actually looking into FDroid to free myself a little from Android locks, wishing for a simple linux + ssh + any signed code I wish.
Around KDE 5 first releases I had a thing for it. But I had what resembles javascript fatigue. The KDE world was too much of a moving target; also, but that's on me, I was fed up with DEs, except for the basics GUI (think OS2, Win3/95) I felt they provided no value over emacs, so that's what I ended up with wmii,emacs,chrome.
Well, the bar is pretty damn low in Unity (IMHO)... terribly inconsistent UI e.g. they seldom follow long set conventions on how field focus and basic keyboarding behavior should work in windows and dialogs. I find it very, very frustrating and am giving KDE plasma a shot.
The question is: how? The website doesn't make it very clear to developers (after a fairly quick skim on my part, at least) as to how they can help with the initiative. I have a Nexus 6p, and it seems like my device isn't supported, but how can I maybe help with porting to a new device?
Yes, this is the pain point of things like this. It really will (most likely) take someone branching it off into a paid product to advance it faster (or) a very large amount of people getting involved. Traditionally these things grow slowly, but I am impressed at what they have so far.
Firefox OS used the android closed source driver vendor centric model and a html/js frontend.
It had most of the downsides of android (closed drivers, no updates after 6 months, buy a new device or get exploited, beholden to vendors, OEMs and telcos which invariably suck, central control over software distribution), and zero of the upsides (abysmal performance [even the dialer was a laggy mess], lack of software)
Except for the fact you might trust Mozilla more than google, it wasn't anymore meaningfully open than android, and suffered crippling drawbacks in comparison. Nobody except a few developers cared that you can write apps in html/js.
Why did the world abandon Maemo? I had a nokia n900, and I swear, it was the greatest phone I ever used. The UI was beautiful, and for 2009, its performance was stunning. I got so used to it and immersed in the "maemo" way of doing things, that when I "upgraded" to a "modern" android phone, I felt as though I had taken a step backwards, despite having hardware that's theoretically better!
Core parts were proprietary because "differentiation".
The leadership was caught in a innovators dilemma (Symbian was aging but had a massive install base, Maemo has future potential but could massacre their Symbian earnings in a transition), and the board in the end brought in a Trojan horse that made a deal with Microsoft.
Also, what you are currently seeing happening in desktop Linux land, wayland, systemd, etc etc etc, is because of lessons (X11 and sysvinit is crap) various devs "learned" while working on Maemo in some capacity or other.
yes they may not be the perfect fit in a power constrained mobile device (My N800 seemed to last me just as well as the Android devices i have around me right now though), but why the hell are we turning the whole DE stack into a mobile phone in response?!
> board in the end brought in a Trojan horse that made a deal with Microsoft.
And the lie keeps being repeated, it was the board that sold Nokia by having a contract that would grant Elop a huge bonus if he managed to do sell the company to someone else!
"According to changes implemented in 2010, Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation… such as selling of Nokia’s handset division."
So it was deliberate on part of the board, still made him look like a trojan horse from the outside as supposedly he was there to get the company back on track.
Actually, Nokia - under Elop's leadership - decided to go to Windows Phone platform for mobile phones, and discontinue Maemo. That WP thing didn't go so well.
However Nokia as a company did not go under; it is still very much there, particularly in telecom infra business.
It seems that very few people these days knows that all the big name European mobile brands (Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens) were also big name infrastructure brands. And that two of them still operate (Ericsson and Nokia, the latter having bought Siemens infrastructure division).
Nokia is the pacman of infra vendors: they acquired Siemens, then Motorola Networks (the infra part). Then recently they acquired ALU. ALU itself is the result of the acquisition by Alcatel of Lucent. And when Nortel went bankrupt, Alcatel also acquired part of the assets and employees. Sooo, lots of infrastructure vendors ended up in today Nokia. Maybe I even missed some ;)
Indeed; what remains of the old big infra vendors is now in Ericsson and Nokia. Then there are the Chinese ones: Huawei and ZTE. Probably others. But particularly Huawei is growing very fast in many markets - the Chinese government is basically giving the money away, so it's hard for others to make a profit, and Huawei takes market share. If you call it a "market" after such subsidies.
Some customers, particularly very many in the USA, are not so happy to have Huawei or ZTE core switches etc, but in emerging markets they are less worried about Chinese intelligence infiltrating them, and also in Europe there seems to be less protectionism and concerns about national security. So the Chinese are catching the global market, without the Americans noticing much.
No, what explains that is that I used C for the first time in 1993, yet I was already coding since 1986.
So I was doing systems like level programming in Timex Basic, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Z80 and 80x86 on those in between years.
Also had friends using 68000, AMOS and GFA Basic on their Amigas.
Also I majored in systems level programming, with emphasis in compilers, which meant I have spent quite some time researching old programming environments, and still do. Better than reading newspapers sometimes.
So I learned that were better ways to do systems programming without having the compromises of C.
The big problem is that all the OEMs that can build you a phone are providing android support because this is what they get from SOC vendors and there is no business incentive to provide "pure linux" support.
Plasma sits on top of the Android HAL like Firefox OS did. Nothing different there. Go buy you QC license and see for how long you'll get blob updates.
You're totally wrong about the performance penalty of FxOS compared to Android on the same hardware, but I'm done arguing that with trollaways.
No idea why this is being downvoted. This matches what I heard about Plasma's mobile endeavors.
In 2012, at the Akademy (KDE conference) in Tallinn, I spoke with Plasma developers who were, at the time, working on a tablet called "Vivaldi", which was supposed to ship with Plasma Active (the KDE 4 version of Plasma Mobile) based on Mer (the community fork of Meego). And they really struggled with the hardware part: They carefully assembled a BOM of parts for which open-source drivers were available, ordered test devices, built the whole software stack. And when they were ready to start mass production, the manufacturer was like: "What, that chip? That's soooo last month. We have this new chip here, which is completely undocumented, but we have an Android driver for you." Last I heard, they never got an actual device shipped because of that mess.
I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but I can easily imagine how that situation led them to base the new Plasma Mobile on the Android HAL.
As this catches on, it only helps improve linux hardware (ARM) support, telephony applications for linux, and the like. As well as being able to have (or make for others) a truly remarkable user interface and apps. This is a mobile computer, running linux, running a desktop environment (not webkit, or Java VM, or closed source code) that only limits what you can make by your skill and imagination.
Yes it looks pretty mediocre now, but that's because its waiting on you to get involved.