maemo.org - Talk - Turning samsung galaxy note 4 into nokia n900!

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- - Turning samsung galaxy note 4 into nokia n900! (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=95650)

Turning samsung galaxy note 4 into nokia n900!

After long time of service, my trusty nokia n900 started to have problems - battery related - lasting less than one day, turning off in the middle of the conversations, random reboots, etc.
Becase the neo900 is still under development, and i needed a phone i can use right now, i decided to look for a smartphone with top specifications and a hardware keyboard. Apart from blackberry passport (which i don't really like), i didn't found anything.
And to be realistic, we will never see smartphones with physical keyboards, unfortunately.
However there is still a chance. We can make our own qwerty equiped smartphones.
For this i decided to buy a smartphone with top specifications and see if i can build "the other half" for it.
So i got the samsung galaxy note 4, and started to search for a bluetooth keyboard. I found the Rii mini to be a good quality keyboard, and long battery life.
Apart from the keyboard i wanted a slide mechanism just like nokia n900, but even more usable, i wanted a slide and tilt mechanism like htc x9500.
So the idea i got was to sue two cases: one for the phone and one for the keyboard. The two cases were to be united by the slide mechanism.
After a weekend of building, here is the end result:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XJw-9lWo-N...1102009035.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8jRjS_ZQAY...1102009047.jpg

Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68Yjjv8QEw

Here is the note 4 qwerty - enabled next to a psion series 5mx and a psion series 3a:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RmBSDMqKhe...150621_002.jpg

And here is note 4 running debian xfce next to a hp jornada 720:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K9D6kloXgl...150621_010.jpg

And here is note 4 emulating windows xp next to htc x9500 running windows 10:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fLj0DhzEVn...1102009044.jpg

In conclusion - the fact that the major smartphones manufacturers are no longer making qwerty phones, gave us the opportunity to build our own, with evenm more functionality.
For example on nokia n900 i was unable to fully control the interface using only the keyboard, i still had to touch the screen sometimes. But with this keyboard and the mousepad it has, i can fully control the phone without touching the screen.
You can see more details on how i build it here: http://simpledevices.blogspot.ro/

Nowadays they are building only a half of the phone. It is up to us to build the other half.