It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly.
But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps.
The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.
Linux was not a mistake on these devices. And I say that as the foremost hater of open source and Linux you can find around here. In fact, the N9 Linux phone was a huge success among everyday people in several countries. Farmers, teenagers, everybody got an N9. You couldn't go to any small party without at least two people having the N9 phone. Everybody loved them. It was in no way a hacker device for nerds.
What killed these Linux phones was Microsoft doing a hostile takeover of Nokia. The owners of Nokia felt they couldn't compete with Apple's iPhone and decided to scuttle their business and transfer out as much money as possible to their own offshore accounts in the Pacific before the company going belly up. I think they could have competed if they weren't such cowards.
Microsoft did take over Nokia much later than the N900. In fact, Nokia lost value after iPhone showed, and it is only when MS could take over it. And the Android is a side effect of the fact that the .NET was not ready to run existing phones, and Microsoft decided to release the WindowsPhone as non-Nokia branded one.
My BSD statement stays, though, MS did some very good work with the WinPhones, and in fact they were super snappy and useful, very close to what iPhones were at the time. And let's not forget, that the flat looks of (not sure which macos) was directly influenced by these winphones...
N9, not N900. Microsoft took over right before the N9 launch and instantly discontinued any further support for the platform. The "burning platform" as Elop called it.
> You couldn't go to any small party without at least two people having the N9 phone. Everybody loved them. It was in no way a hacker device for nerds.
I don't think I ever saw N9 or any of the N9XX phones in real life.
BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix.
What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too.
Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on.
Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
Good design of the packaging has nothing to do with underlying OS, unless say it overheats a lot. TBH, the N900 had a fair design, I've used one, not talking from a bystander view, and it was good indeed. Save for the keyboard that perhaps costs 30% the device in order to be where it was (sliding and all). But also, the Nokia Nx's were slow as hell compared to iOS.
> The underlying OS makes no difference.
perhaps you've never experienced the bliss after setting up a BSD that just works 10 years after... and have never experienced the incredibly stable and snappy multiprocessing this miracle of a kernel (and OS) exhibits for decades now.
Let me tell you something - 20 years ago Linux was slow and unstasble as shit, and even slower on embedded. On the other hand FreeBSD and other BSD-derivates were super stable, but took more effort to setup and work with. They did not have the UI though, what Apple did was to wire their half-baked NeXT-inherited GUI on top of it and it flied.
I'm not even going to comment on the abomination called ObjectiveC, but matter of fact - the underlying OS workings were done in a brilliant way, WHICH, more than everything else enabled all the glitter tossed over the UI that you guys love so much. Like, there's a reason for game engines being written in C++ and not Python, right? Still a programming language though...
Sure lot of people adore what Sir Jony Ive did to the overall look and packaging of these products, and for a reason. But what truly distinguishes all these Mac products is what they can get out the hardware.
Sorry, but win3.11 did not work well on a 128kb RAM device. I've followed everything MS released since DOS 3.30 and witnessed firsthand the evolution of Linux and many of the distros. Nothing comes close to what Apple could do and is still doing with their hardware/software. No matter if you like Tim Cook (me personally - not) or Steve Jobs (very inspiring guy).
One of the reasons MacOS could draw attention from developers, who now form very important part of the user-base, is the fact they have a Unix-like thing at their disposal, and a very fast unix-like thing with some sort of a not-so-disgusting UI (wait for MacOS 26 though).
Nobody cares about darn window shadows, edges, or the unreasonable animation effects that we'd be turning off sooner or later.
Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.
Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.
tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.
Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.
The N9 could have saved the company in my opinion. It was great. I had it for some years before it broke and then found the Android I had afterwards to be poor compared to it.
A bigger mistake was to not give the N770, N800, etc. phone capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn't even consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS. They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.
perhaps because phone capabilities require more chips, and SDR that would've made the N800/N900 too pricey. but, honestly, this thing was slow as shit, I loved the design so much, and hated this half-baked Debian equally.
The fact you could run apt on it did not help that much for the regular user.
But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps.
The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.