I found the Nokia N900 from my “archives”! One of the last attempts before the giant mobile firm collapsed. I was very curious does it still work? I haven't used that for years. Battery might be dead was my initial thought. By dead I mean that you are not able to charge it anymore.
Luckily I found a charger labeled by Nokia and it seemed to have right type of USB B connector. Plugged in and surprise! Orange light lighted up and Nokia logo pop upped to the screen of the device. Wow! This might work indeed.
Meanwhile smartphone is charging couple words of N900 what it is. At the day (late 2009) it was announced by Nokia I was quite excited to get it. At that time I was Symbian user by heart. Didn’t even want to try other products (nowadays I use iPhone 5S but that is different story). N900 has Maemo operating system inside. It is the predecessor of Meego. Both of these are Linux based systems. All included features hinted that this could be very good smartphone/palm computer indeed. Very good camera, Linux based OS, Nokia support and lot’s of promises (founded to be promiseware) of upcoming apps. There was few pre-installed application with good quality but 3rd party apps never came. One of the other nice features was also FM transmitter. Use case for that was to stream music to car stereos using FM frequencies. Also this one has still one advantage over modern mobile phones. Physical keyboard! I know it was one reason why Apple won the battle (having just touch screen) but still miss devices with keyboards.
Powering up the device
It’s booting up!
First came PIN code screen. I don’t have SIM card for this? And don’t want to mess up with my employers SIM card (that’s the only one I have). Well this screen can be skipped.
Then nice configuration screen of time and date. Which worked of course via the touch screen. Must felt good on back in days of 2009/2010 when I got it. Considering Symbian phone I had before N900 was very limited with features , so these touch screens was something from the future. Of course iPhone users had this all before.
Hmm. It seems to have still old background image configured. I remember this Ferrari. Also all apps is there as well.
Now the connections. I want to see if I can connect to my WLAN. Connections settings found very quickly and scan found also my network. Very promising! Compared to Symbian based Nokia devices, it was always one hour job to find right menu/settings to do things. Oh those times! :D
It works! Maybe I spend some time with this device. Nice piece of history. Of course 5 or 6 years is not that long time but in technology world it is. Especially in mobile devices. I will keep this piece. Who knows how valuable this is in another 20 years or so.
The Maemo Community
It seems that there is quite active community available for N900. Community can be found by following link http://maemo.org/intro/
Intro page says that there is over 22 000 users and over 900 development projects. Not bad!
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