I knew this was coming, but I was hoping I could delay it long enough that someone would come up with another phone running a proper Linux OS to which I could jump, hacks and scripts at the ready, with glee and abandon.

Alas, such a product has yet to grace our plane of existence, and though I thought I could stand my N900's glacial pace at loading Internet content for at least a few more months I made the crucial mistake of accepting a friend's Nokia Lumia 520 (which he loathes) as payment for reflashing and fixing his Android (which he loves).

It's the cheapest, weakest entry-level Nokia smartphone currently in production and it runs an OS I don't really like (WinPhone being as proprietary and closed-source as it's possible to be).

And it blew my overclocked N900 into the weeds.

The magic is broken; I can't go back. If I were to try I'd curse the N900's slowness every time I opened a webpage, and I know I don't want to do that. I've brought it back from the dead and hacked it and fixed its USB and glued a massive battery to its back and loved it greatly, and with all the effort I've put in it and the personality it has I'd much rather remember it with fondness. As a result I've decided to retire it permanently and maintain the good memories unspoiled, though it's my hope that I'll find some alternative non-mobile use for it at some point.

I don't know where the future will lead me. I might keep the 520 as a stopgap while I wait for another phone with a proper OS, but while WinPhone does its job it's tough to swallow going from a super-hackable tiny Linux computer with the side benefit of making calls to a super-stock system on which I can't even replace the stock touchscreen keyboard.

Or I might go Android. It has its flaws - chief of which that of being a supermassive inefficient resource hog - but it's open and free and tweakable and it has a million and one apps. I'd have to get a whole other phone, though, which is an expense I'd prefer to avoid, because I'm very prone to the "ooh, this one is only €20 more expensive but so much better" syndrome that starts with looking at €130 low/midranges and ends with buying a €300 phablet, then wondering why my debit card is empty.

Whichever way I go, though, I'll miss with all my heart the tiny linux-phone that could, not to mention its awesome community which kept it going against all odds in an increasingly unfriendly world for as long as it was humanly possible.

Thanks to you all, and farewell. We shall see each other again when and if a proper successor to the N900 arrives and the fun can begin anew.

Farewell, I hope you've enjoyed the experience.

As one leaves, another returns.
I pulled out my N900, from a 9 month hibernation, last week to... just play with.
I've since retired my HTC One and rediscovered the thrill, customisation, and featues of this device, hope you will to.

Never used a Windows phone but had to use an Android as a stop gap for a couple of weeks while my N900 was temporarily indisposed and I can tell you, I was so relieved to come back to this old, sluggish dinosaur.

No Linux phones? I take it you are not aware of the N9, Jolla or the Neo900 project?

if I turn off Javascript I find my non-overclocked N900 loading my daily web pages pretty fast.
I recon that using an Android for a couple of days is a good cure against N900 tiredness Luckily there is also some hope on the horizon that one day we might buy a new motherboard for our N900 (NeoN900 project)
After a brief Jolla adventure I see myself end up with an NeoN900... http://neo900.org/

Take care

I was in your position, but you'll be back, one day you'll pick it up again and just be like, why did I ever leave.

I have switched to N9 as my daily phone. Fast (at least when compared with N900) and having essential features that I need. So I am pretty happy about it. Still have my N900 though.

Actually, I am.

The N9 doesn't look like a tremendous improvement over the N900 (for instance it still uses a single-core A8, though the gig of RAM is actually pretty good), is hard to get ahold of and expensive even second-hand. New old-stock ones don't seem to sell cheaper than €250 here, which for a three-and-a-half years old phone is rather a lot of money.

The Jolla is very expensive and only barely out of vaporware status. I might get it eventually, but I'll wait for it to become available cheaper and at a consumer level rather than "preorder now and you might get yours in a few months".

And the Neo900 seems very underwhelming to me. I had a look at its specs and most entry-level phones of today do better, and for the bare motherboard they want as much money as you'd pay for a super-high-end top-of-the-line phone of the sort bought by people who have too much money to bother spec-hunting.

If the bare motherboard cost the €70-or-so that its specs would justify (seriously, there are €40 Android-on-a-stick computers that do so much better it isn't even funny) I might give one a shot, but for the money they're planning to charge it's a complete non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

I don't want you to think I'm disgruntled or disappointed; I fully realize a cottage operation like the Neo900 can't hope to match prices with giant Chinese sweatshop industries that churn out Android sticks by the million, and I sympathize, but the fact remains that the price remains unjustifiable for my wallet.

Anyway... I wrote the post yesterday; by coincidence, today I got some pretty heavy news - which means I'll have to switch priorities and fairly serious things will be on my mind for a while, and I can't really be bothered matching specs and phone hunting right now. I think I'll keep the 520 for the time being, and wait until this particular situation has blown over before looking at other phones. Hopefully by then I can actually buy a Jolla or a Ubuntu phone, or even something with Tizen in it.

Which would be fine if most websites didn't work at all with Javascript disabled. I'd love it if there was a law mandating every site to have a "works on a Pentium 133" static version, but this isn't the case.

You mean you owned a Jolla? How was it?

Is Windows Phone any less of a resource hog? Or do they just mask it by not multitasking worth a crap?

Actually I'd like to know that too. My first guess qwould be yes, since WP apps run natively and not emulatedvinterpreted/virtualized/whatever, but I have no personal experience to back it up with.