In all, I had five n900s at one time or another (I'm down to two). I never had a USB problem.

I had three, two out of three had USB problems. I did the entire (yet unnecessary on any other device I own) shave down the USB prongs, treated it with gentle respect, so forth.

Different strokes for different folks. I got the **** end of the stick it seems. I will not discount those that had no problems nor had problems whatsoever.

out of the 8 n900's I have owned...
5 of which I still own ...having given or sold the other 3...
Only 1 ever had the infamous usb port issue...
AND...
I bought it with the full knowledge....in advance...that it had that issue...
I wanted it as a parts device...in case I ever needed it.
It was cheap ...so it made sense.

I have never actually bought an n900 and "had" the problem occur.
I guess I lucked out.

Of course I learned from the mistake of others...
and I have put little stress on any of the ports on any of my n900s ...
other than to data transfer ...
rarely have I used it for charging...
I use an external universal for that.
Also I filed down all the hooks on the n900 cables I had ..to ensure zero stress to he internal of the port.

So...perhaps not just lucky...

I am not really sure what is missing at this point as there are several brands providing devices with keyboards. Blackberry/TCL, Planet Computers Gemini, Dragonbox Pyra, Pocketchip, Topjoy Falcon, GPD, and One Mix.

Plus there are several devices with keyboard addons, singleboard computer cases and there is also the potential KS Phabtop and Graalphone concepts.

With the exception of blackberry most of those devices can be made to run some sort of linux.

Small devices with keyboards and small sized tablets/umpcs/mids are a niche market and ones that can run full linux or full windows are a niche within a niche. The physical keyboard and the umpc almost vanished but they made a great comeback. The fact that are so many options is really quite astonishing. Honestly I would just go with the Top Joy, One Mix 2 or Gemini and stop being so picky.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i5/i5-7y54

might give the effort some real value,
...if it can run Debian

Do they have to? Was it not you bemoaning folks no longer being adventurous in the other thread?

Some folks, including yours truly, avoided Nokia when it was big exactly because it was big. It was the Microsoft of the mobile world. I may have missed on the Nxx0 series in the early days but... I could never have been able to afford them anyway.

On the other hand, I decided to be adventurous and go for a little known brand called Palm. I never regretted it. I used the same device for 9 years. The best UX of all time, unrivaled by anything to this day. No awkwardly placed keys (right, wicket? ), every UX element thought through to the last detail and for maximum efficiency. Why does no one learn? There is an existing example of how things can be done well yet everyone keeps reinventing the wheel. Badly.

Nokia is to cellphones what commodore is to computers. They made cellphones and smartphones affordable to the average person and easy to use. They dominated with symbian and s40/s30 and innovated with maemo/meego. But their products became dated and they lost sight of what made them successful to begin with. They had a reasonable upgrade path with meego and abandoned it.

Nokia was overtaken by the Samsungs, HTCs, Lgs and Motorolas of the world similar to how Commodore and atari failed to compete with IBM clone makers.

The Nokia of old ain't returning.

The Pyra isn't out yet.
All the others are either bundled with Windows or don't run a mainline Linux kernel, so are no option for someone who actually cares about FLOSS.
(Edit: Or they aren't actually "pocketable", despite their name.)

btw:
Has someone (with the actual skills) thought about creating a TOHKBD for the Librem 5? Purism certainly isn't [1], which is my main reason for not actually considering this otherwise interesting device.


[1] https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-about-a...the-phone/1790

https://liliputing.com/2018/10/there...t-devices.html

The Windows devices can run Linux distros.

Nevertheless, the Pocket 2 comes bundled with Windows. It also doesn't have a trackpoint anymore, and is still missing keyboard backlight.
The Pocket 1 has no SD reader and only one USB port - compromises I'm not willing to take on a device that is basically a netbook.

Then these devices have no easily exchangable batteries and can't phone. I'd be willing to compromise here, but only if the rest would fit, which it doesn't.