Please Note:

I purchased the Nokia N900 from the New York Flagship store within the week it was released, I used that phone for 4 years. I have traveled to South America and Europe using Maemo 5. Please feel free to look at my posts here and see my contributions to the Maemo 5 community. I am writing this because in 2012 I found that the N900 was proving not to be an efficient communication device for me, I have experimented with Android (and NITDroid) on numerous occasions and found them to be glitchy and often gimmicky. I have always viewed Apple and their products as sub par to any developer or programmer as they are so closed off and proprietary. I hope that my "journey to the dark side" and how pleased I am with the path I took might enlighten others as it did in previous posts (as many did not know an iPhone could run SSHd and a VNC Server when jailbroken along with many other things). My experience with iOS has gotten better with every refinement of the operating system.


Hello old friends and comrades.

I wanted to say hello, from the perceived dark side, for those who might remember me I left the Maemo 5/N900 community around 2 years ago in search of a new device, that device was an iPhone 4S.

Here are links to the past threads about it:

New Phone Help... I can't do it any longer..

iPhone 4S: First Weeks Impression

N900 to Jailbroken iPhone 4S Thoughts

iPhone 4S (iOS 5.1.1): A look back at the N900

I am now on an 32GB iPhone 5S that has never been jailbroken (my choice, as jailbreak was available) and I also purchased a 16GB iPad Air to accompany my iPhone. As well as [gasp] an Apple TV.

I still have a problem with the iPhone not having an indicator LED and I think raising the headset up to your ear and removing it from your ear would be a nice feature that I miss from my N900 that Apple should incorporate.

Over the past two years I think we can all agree that IR technology, especially the one way IR technology of the N900 is now almost mute in comparison to Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC of it's Android counterparts.

Even though I owned (and still own) numerous batteries for my N900 I was never a battery swapper, on average use my iPhone will last me for over 24 hours on one charge. If in use in conjunction with my iPad, much longer. The concern of a removable battery never bothered me.

Flash, the argument being laughable in retrospect. Never really affected me.

Removeable storage... well that's a neat one. With the iPhone being able to use Google Drive (15GB, free), Dropbox (23GB, free), and iCloud (5GB, free, however I upgraded to 25GB for $20/yr) - those are just the services I use. That gives me a total of 63GB of cloud based storage. I have come to the conclusion that cloud based storage is far superior to removable storage, in nearly (will touch on that) every aspect (price, storage compatibility, storage limitations). I think Netflix proved this quite well to Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video.

With iOS 7 I did not feel the need to jailbreak, there was a slight temptation but in iOS 7 my main issue was pretty much fixed: better multitasking. While I would like to SSH/VNC into my device it is not really a huge deal to me. Applications such as "Find my iPhone" are much more useful and practical.

PC and console games such as Max Payne, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 3D, and many more. I remember working on porting QBASIC Gorillas to the N900 in Python around 3 years ago.

Looking back, physically, well there's the LED indicator, still wish the iPhone had it. That is it.

In terms of software, I do miss the auto speakerphone script that was written for the N900. Wish the iPhone had that.

Other than that, I don't know how some of you could still be using the N900 as your primary communications device in 2014. I am happy to see the community is still thriving, as it is a great community.

Some gripes about the iPhone 5S/iOS 7:

For some reason iOS 7's implication of Siri is poor (as opposed to iOS 5/6), it was on my iPhone 4S and on my iPhone 5S, the voice recognition is not as good as it was previously - I can't explain it.

Applications such as Pages, Numbers, Skype, Dropbox, all the social media applications, all the clients such as Pandora, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu+, etc., as well as all the Google applications such as Hangouts, Google Maps, Docs, Sheets, etc. are all exceptional and lend the iPhone to a productivity level that is on par with a desktop computer. Not to mention all my data is automatically backed up and synced with iCloud. I can then manually put data in other cloud based services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Couple that with having an iPad and one could easily take a business trip without a need for a laptop.

I have so many different methods of communication it is amazing to me, off the top of my head I have FaceTime, Skype, and Google Hangouts just for video chatting alone!

Some beefs I have with the iPhone (more specifically unjailbroken iOS 7): issues handling compressed files, lack of .PSD/.AI support from Adobe, but that's about it.

But there is one major beef I have and that's due to my personal habits, I torrent a lot of media - this presents two issues:

1) There is not a proper BitTorrent client for iOS

2) This is why I used the phrase "I have come to the conclusion that cloud based storage is far superior to removable storage, in nearly (will touch on that) every aspect" - it's not very plausible to download a 1.5GB TV show onto a device that is only 16/32GB. This does present an issue if you pirate your media (let's be honest, not everyone is going to pay to get HBO just for Game of Thrones). With that being said without access to a wireless hotspot or internet (such as on an airplane) viewing media is quite difficult (as I could just upload it to my Dropbox and view it from there).

Thus I am sticking by my assertion that the iPhone 5S running iOS 7.1 (if it is jailbroken then it opens up a lot of possibilities with file handling, a shell, SSHd, VNC server, etc.) is the best mobile device out there, especially if coupled with an iPad.

I have a business partner whose main device is a Samsung Note 3. I take out the N900 from time to time to demonstrate to him how closed Android is when compared to Maemo 5. I recently insisted he go to Walmart and pick up an iPad 4 just for work. He has really started to like it and uses it a lot (to both of our surprise).

For those of you who have moved on from the N900 what devices have you moved on to? How do you look back on the N900?

Edit: I should state due to my cloud argument that I have a grandfathered unlimited data AT&T plan. However, I think anyone who lives in city (as opposed to a rural area) would have plenty of WiFi hotspots.

I suspect all those Pierogi users will disagree. IR is still in widespread use, and it will be some years before that is no longer the case.

I have never once replaced my N900 battery to extend its use during the day. I do like having the freedom to do so, though. Also, I replaced the original Nokia battery with a Scud to improve battery life. Batteries have a limited lifespan, and need to be changed periodically. I don't want to have to take my device apart or hand it over to a 'genius' in order to change the battery.

Flash sucks. It's a battery killing, DRM enabling, resource hogging piece of crap.

Cloud storage is great ... until the service closes or they change the terms and conditions. That's before we even consider any privacy and security issues. Local storage FTW.

N900 is one of a kind in today's stale smartphone market. For those that value its unique features, there is no alternative.

I am currently located in the middle of nowhere, literally. Best thing I can get here is not quite stable 2G, unlimited though. Any kind of cloud storage can kiss my *** goodbye. I even successfully downloaded some series from torrents, painfully slow though.
Why not? Browsing ain't the best, but still better than anything keyboardless, and stylus also helps a lot. I have some experience with capacitive screens and was really impressed how older resistive technology beats it in usability. Also, N900 plays music and videos very well, as long as the latter are AVI, at least. Didn't set up EasyDebian for office stuff yet, but desktop office on a phone-sized device is very attractive.

However, I should say, if I didn't buy N900, I might have ended up with iPhone 5, or its clone. Because, in my opinion, they at least do not look as ugly as most other devices out there.

Anyway, after meeting N900 - no thanks, I don't want a smartphone in my pocket where I have a phone-sized PC that does all the telephony as well!

Can I share files via Bluetooth on an iOS device now (this is an honest question, I didn't check)?
The advantage of cloud storage only applies for those who have unlimited high speed Internet access which not everyone has... I have 50GB free dropbox space but don't really use it.

Yes, Apple has coined that "Air Drop" and works very well, surprisingly. (I have always found many Bluetooth file transfers and connectivity to be finicky)

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5887

While I don't agree with many of your points, I factually disagree with the above statement, after writing this I did find out there are a few phones on the market that seem to be so-so N900 successors:

Sailfish Mobile
Tizen
Ubuntu Touch
FireFox OS

When I looked up the company who makes the actual device that runs Sailfish on Wikipedia though I read this:

Upon watching some reviews the tech specs seems poor and extremely over priced, also not all the Android apps worked 100%.

Edit: Not to mention Jolla devices not working on North American frequencies.

Well I followed the link. What I meant by Bluetooth file sharing is to share it with anybody who has Bluetooth, not just apple devices... Nobody in my family owns an apple device.
And IR on the N900 with Pierogi is really useful.

Then no, I do not believe so. It's Apple. From the start of my journey two years ago I stated I disliked the company and many of their practices.

If you jailbreak your device I am sure it is possible, but with stock iOS 7.1.1 I do not believe it is.

I feel much of the N900 community has the same mentality as George R. R. Martin:

http://youtu.be/X5REM-3nWHg

A huge qualm I had with the N900 was no spell checking, and I think that is a huge issue when it comes to mobile devices with small keyboards (weather they be physical or not) and the conveniences that modern devices offer. However stated in the interview, that is not his primary computer - that is his work computer.

Hmm, not quite the same. I myself write all my code (and most of my other documents) in the editor "vim" (based on "vi"). The vi editor was created in 1976, so its pedigree is even _older_ than Wordstar.

But, you see, there's a difference. Wordstar is a commercial product; only MicroPro could legally make changes to the software. So, when MicroPro went belly-up, all work on Wordstar ended. Wordstar is, therefore, dead.

Vim is an open-source product. Anyone who has an interest can pick up the source code and make changes to it. Even if Bram Moolenaar suddenly did a 180 and tried to close off access to all the code he's written over the years, he legally couldn't do it. Vim cannot die in the manner that closed-source software does. And so, Vim has the advantage of decades of development work behind it, and continues to have bugfixes and new features up to this day. (Also, vim has been ported to pretty much every OS I can think of, and ships by default with most distributions of Linux and with every copy of Apple's OS X.)


Back to the topic at hand; I use my N900 for my portable computing needs, because it conveniently provides the shells, editors, and other tools that I use daily on my Mac Minis, and on my Linux boxes. That I've used on my laptops. That I've used on the servers at work. That I used back in college.

Certainly I could jailbreak an IOS device, or root an Android, to get the kind of functionality that comes for free with the N900. (And I imagine I probably will one of these days -- I've finally picked up an Android device to hack on.) But why go through all that hassle? The N900 does what I want from the instant I first turn it on, without mucking around in the OS or constantly fighting against the manufacturer...