I started with N900 but well before N900 my previous smartphone was N95-1.

The N95-1 has been one hell of a horrid experience. Every packages needed to be signed and there was no easy way to bypass the certificate authentication methods. I remember the days of using OPDA certificates and such to get pynetmony working. It was only pynetmony that kept me sane in retaining N95-1. Every other time, if it wasn't issues with getting softwares signed, it was the device randomly rebooting. I read the NAM version of N95 (which was not N95-1) had far more RAM than the horrid N95-1.

I've been using linux on and off for a fair few years now. It just happened one day when a bloke from the US told me about Nokia N900 when he and I were on the lookout for new phones/devices that could potentially be a weapon in the pocket. This was all about aircrack-ng, yes the wireless pentesting suite. He suggested many other devices such as OQO but it just happens to be at the time when I was fully fed up with N95-1 that he found an interesting blog with N900 and being able to sniff wireless traffic. He pointed that out to me. That's when my interest with Nokia N900 grew.

I never knew what maemo were or what N900 predecessors were. At the time my interest grew from simply using N900 as a portable wireless pentesting device into something probably Nokia would have ever wished for N900 to be, a full fledged device designed and used the way it was meant to be. My interests with N900 peaked when I got my hands on a demo N900 at the store, the staff wasn't very knowledgeable but I basically started navigating in N900 like as if I had some insight. At that time I was so happy that I couldn't refuse on buying my very own N900. From one instance of where it was a thoroughly well researched and thought about purchase very quickly boiled down into instinctive purchasing. I simply couldn't resist.

On many levels I loathed my N95-1 but at the same time for a linux handheld (!) to have phone functionality was something I could have never imagined. The conclusion became clear that I am going to stick with N900.

Since then I have had many ups and downs with N900, it was years ago when I first gazed at N900 in my own hands at the shop wishing the device was mine till now having three (!!) of the same thing (actually its four but the fourth one is broken). My interest with N900 and maemo overall has not diminished tremendously since. As I got involved within the *.maemo.org as well as on IRC it became clear that n9 was the last device.

Since switching back and forth between N900 and n9, I did have some gripes with n9 but I cannot stop loathing how I wished n9 to have a hardware keyboard and less of being so paranoid (with aegis). Eventually my n9 broke one day by accident and now I'm stuck with N900 until one day I may be able to fix that n9 again (or somehow acquire proper N950).

Day in, day out I've constantly pondered how such a project (maemo) did make an impact (albeit small) on the handheld/smartphone realm. How linux was close to dominating every (other) thing. How had Nokia decided to keep OSSO/Maemo alive, the dreams of a proper handheld device with phone functionality could be married as one instead of the way N900 is. Then again the reality as we can see is far different.